Can't access BitLocker encrypted Storage Spaces drives

Question

Can't access BitLocker encrypted Storage Spaces drives

Andy Wilson 0

I started BitLocker encrypting three Storage Spaces drives on a Windows 11 Pro 23H2 computer I am using as a home NAS (9 drive pool totaling 32.7TB: 5x SATA, 1x eSATA, and 3x USB3). The 5TB dual parity drive (with only 1GB used) encrypted successfully, but Windows updated and rebooted before the two 7.5TB dual parity drives (with probably 33% and 50% used respectively -encryption was literally taking days) finished encrypting. Now, encryption does not re-start and the BitLocker Drive Encryption screen shows them both as "BitLocker on (Locked)". The only drop-down option there is "Unlock drive", and when I do that I get an error window stating "The BitLocker encryption on this drive isn't compatible with your version of Windows. Try opening the drive using a newer version of Windows". This doesn't make sense to me since it was encrypting on the same computer. I have seen some suggestions of opening the drive on another computer, but I'm not sure how that is possible with a 9-drive array pool hosting the Storage Spaces drives. I have the recovery keys available, but cant find anywhere to use them.

How do I get the BitLocker drives unlocked, and more importantly access to the data on them?

Andy Wilson 0 Reputation points

2024-01-05T22:36:21.92+00:00

I ultimately regained access to the BitLocker drives through a very strange sequence of events. One of the hard drives was accidentally not powered on during a boot-up, and Storage Spaces went through some sort of "rebuilding" exercise when it recognized a hard drive was missing. Once the "rebuilding" was complete, BitLocker suddenly recognized the Storage Spaces drives worked again and successfully completed the remaining encrypting of them. Once encryption was completed, everything has been fine since. Disaster averted (sometimes better to be lucky than good).

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Andy Wilson 0 Reputation points

2024-01-05T22:36:21.92+00:00

I ultimately regained access to the BitLocker drives through a very strange sequence of events. One of the hard drives was accidentally not powered on during a boot-up, and Storage Spaces went through some sort of "rebuilding" exercise when it recognized a hard drive was missing. Once the "rebuilding" was complete, BitLocker suddenly recognized the Storage Spaces drives worked again and successfully completed the remaining encrypting of them. Once encryption was completed, everything has been fine since. Disaster averted (sometimes better to be lucky than good).

Answer 1

Hello

According to present symptom, there is possibility that present disk has got corrupted. It is recommended to contact the professional data recovery center for help if the data in the drive is important before we take any actions.

We can try the following steps to troubleshoot present issue:

1.check the presenst status of the drive with command line "manage-bde -status E:" (replace the drive letter with your own drive letter)

2.Try "manage-bde -unlock E: -recoverypassword xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxx" to unlock the drive (replace the E: with your own drive letter)

3.Try to recover the data to other drive with repair-bde command.

repair-bde C: D: -rp 111111-222222-333333-444444-555555-666666-777777-888888

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/repair-bde

4.Since the issue after update, we can try to uninstall the installed update then reboot to check the issue again.

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Can't access BitLocker encrypted Storage Spaces drives

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