Can someone explain why on a laptop if the secondary hard drive is using bitlocker it would also bitlock the primary mSata hard drive, that makes no sense to me,
I assumed only one hard drive would be affected if i lost my recovery key.
Can you post a picture of disk management: Disk Management - How to Post a Screenshot of | Windows 10 Tutorials
I actually, reformatted the mSata and put a fresh copy on it, I was just curious as it seemed a an odd thing for bitlocker to do, I assume there exists some cross over between the primary hard drive and any additional internal hard drives on a system, just curious myself, certainly wouldn't use it ever again.
If they are part of the same volume bitlocker will encrypt them - that is why I asked you to post disk management screenshot. If your mSata drive was a different volume then Bitlocker would not encrypt it (same as any other drive or partition).
I don't understand what you are giving up on btw - mSata or Bitlocker?
Thanks for the reply, I probably didn't explain it properly, I had two hard drives in a laptop, the mSata was the primary hard drive, with the boot, and the sshd hard drive was used for storage, that drive was the one with bitlocker on it, when the drive failed or went into bitlocker mode with the lost recovery key, it seemed unusual that the primary mSATA drive would not boot normally, even removing the secondary hard drive still presented me with the recovery key screen.
So, that's what I find odd, why would a secondary hard drive affect a primary hard drive that isn't bitlocked, I assumed they would be separate or does bitlocker encrypt at a kernel level as well. They were two separate volumes, C: for the mSATA and volume D: for the drive that was encrypted.
I was just curious about the cross-over, thanks.
Just out of curiosity was the Windows Page File on the MSATA as well or did you create it on the SSD. I am not saying this is any kind of reason for your problem, I am just curious.
The default mode for Windows 10 Pro, at least build 1803, is to turn BitLocker on. Why wouldn't the primary mSATA drive be encrypted? You don't think there is personal data stored on the C: drive? What about temporary internet files?
When I discovered bitlocker was turned on, I simply decrypted all my drives with manage-bde -off C: (etc). But it would be nice if I was given the choice by the OS whether I wanted it on or not.
I'm not exactly sure when Bitlocker got turned on my computers. All I know is I never did it intentionally. On one of them I ended up with a boot problem and when I tried to correct it, I got asked for a recovery key. I had to go to my Microsoft account and, sure enough, there were recovery keys listed for several of my computers! I had no idea it was turned on on any of my computers.
My drives were optional to turn bitlocker on, I did try all the manage-bde options, they just didn't work, I suppose for me it's the realisation that it's not an isolation thing, any secondary hard drive will by default affect the primary hard drive even if it's explicitly not turned on, to me that doesn't seem correct, certainly unintended consequence. So a secondary internal drive will bitlock a primary hard drive. Lesson learn't :)
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