System Reserved Drive and Bitlocker

Question

I have set up compliance policy to ensure all fixed drives attach to tenant are bitlocker enabled.

I have 2 partitions on the device in question:

• C: Drive (Working Partition)
• D: Drive (System Reserved) Partition.

C: is bitlocker protected, but D: isn't, and it's throwing a non-compliance flag as a result, simple question is it OK to bitlocker protect D:, as I believe it stores things like Windows Recovery environment, reserved space for Start Up files, etc.

I really would like to get the device into compliance.

Answer 1

@Richard Berry, Thanks for posting in Q&A. Based on my researching, the System Reserved partition often acts as the system partition; it holds essential files, including the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) store that holds boot configuration parameters. Windows Recovery environment (Windows RE) is an extensible recovery platform. The system partition store the files essential to load Windows after the BIOS or UEFI firmware has prepared the hardware. It should not be encrypted.

But for our compliance policy, it requires all fixed drives attached need to enable BitLocker which will cause non-compliant. For such devices, I suggest to unassign the D drive to the System Reserved Partition to see if it will change to compliant.

Hope it can help.

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