Ever faced a situation where your Drive had become inaccessible after unlocking it with BitLocker? Maybe your BitLocker Password was forgotten or Recovery Key lost? Recently I followed this tutorial to lock a drive using BitLocker on my system using the BitLocker Repair Tool. Following the tutorial, I kept the recovery key as an important consideration. Everything went smooth but the issue occurred when I accidentally interrupted the process when the BitLocker was locking my drive.
Drive inaccessible after unlocking BitLocker Encrypted Data
The issue became more complex when I tried to access the data inside the drive.
I received the following error message:
Drive Location Not Available. Access is denied
BitLocker Repair Tool
So if your BitLocker Password is forgotten or the Recovery Key lost, you can use BitLocker Repair Tool to access & recover data & files from inaccessible BitLocker drive which has been encrypted using BitLocker in Windows 11/10/8/7. It is available for download at Microsoft.
The BitLocker Repair Tool (Repair-bde) is a command-line tool included with Windows 11/10/8/7. This tool can be used to access encrypted data on a severely damaged hard disk if the drive was encrypted by using BitLocker Drive Encryption. It is used especially for the extraction of data from under locked BitLocker drives.
According to Technet, here is what to do. First of all make sure that:
- Your test computer has a BitLocker-protected drive (under locked drives can also be taken).
- You must be able to provide administrative credentials.
- You must have at least one of the following:
- Recovery password
- Recovery key file location
- Recovery package file location and the corresponding recovery password
- Recovery package file location and the corresponding recovery key file location
- You must have an empty output volume of equal or larger size than the BitLocker-protected drive (whose contents will be completely overwritten after the repair operation).
Assumptions: Consider that we’re talking of Drive E: drive. We have to recover data from it and extract it to F: drive. We have a 48 digit recovery password i.e.-
062612-026103-175593-225830-027357-086526-362263-513414
We are also assuming that we have the recovery key file located at F:\RecoveryKey.bek and recovery package location at F:\ExportedKeyPackage.
You have to modify the above assumptions in accordance with your environment.
Now open Command Prompt and run any one of the commands in accordance with the recovery data you’re owning.
To repair using a recovery password:
repair-bde E: F: -rp 062612-026103-175593-225830-027357-086526-362263-513414
To repair using a recovery key:
repair-bde E: F: -rk F:\RecoveryKey.bek
To repair using a recovery package and the corresponding recovery password:
repair-bde E: F: -kp F:\ExportedKeyPackage -rp 062612-026103-175593-225830-027357-086526-362263-513414
To repair using a recovery package and the corresponding recovery key:
repair-bde E: F: -kp F:\ExportedKeyPackage -rk F:\RecoveryKey.bek
Once BitLocker verifies the command you have inserted and it will copy the data to output volume (F: drive in our case) from the encrypted one. Thus the data is recovered from under locked/interrupted on locking a drive through BitLocker.
Hope you find the article useful.
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