Bitlocker doesn't recognize external hard drive

Question

Recently bought an external hard drive and wanted to use bitlocker go to password protect it. I plugged the hard drive into my laptop through a usb 3.0 connection and it appears in my file explorer just fine. However, when go into "manage bitlocker" it does not appear in the section for removable data drives. Not sure what is happening, any help would be appreciated. Perhaps I have to do something to the drive before bitlocker will recognize it?

Answer 1

Do you see the system drive in the Bitlocker Control options?

Does the external drive contain any data on it? if not, can you use Disk Management to delete the volume on it, create a new volume using all the space, and reformat it?

Answer 2

Creating a new volume and reformatting worked. Thank you so much for the help!

Answer 3

I am running Windows 10 pro and when I go into the policies they are listed as not configured. The hard drive is a Toshiba Canvio Basics 2 TB USB 3.0 Hard Drive. I successfully used bitlocker on my internal hard drive 2 years ago so maybe the external drive is the issue?

Answer 4

Thanks for the assistance. Here is the drive as it appears in disk managment. It appears to be formatted with NFTS and is a basic type disk. It still does not get recognized by bitlocker. Any other suggestions?

Answer 5

Hi and thanks for reaching out. My name is William, I’m an Independent Advisor. I'll be happy to help you out today.

Does the drive have a file system applied to it? if not, format it first with NTFS, then apply Bitlocker drive encryption. Otherwise, if it is already formatted, then check that the disk type is not Dynamic. To check this, open the Disk Management utility and check the drive type and make it basic type disk, if necessary.