Problems encrypting Win10 drive on dual-boot laptop

imrazor · 29 Jul 2018

I recently had to travel, and several times had to leave my laptop unattended. This made me realize how vulnerable it was to theft, so I have decided to encrypt the drive, or at least my personal files on the drive.

The laptop (a Dell Latitude E6430) has Windows 10 Pro and Linux Fedora 28 already installed on separate drives. I've already encrypted my home folder on the Linux drive. The Linux partition shares a "data" partition formatted NTFS on the same drive that I do not wish to encrypt.

Encrypting the Linux home folder involved several steps, but the process was relatively straightforward. I'm having a lot of issues encrypting the Windows partition. I have enabled TPM and Secure Boot in the UEFI, but still cannot enable Bitlocker. Every time I try I get a message to the effect that the C: drive cannot be automatically unlocked. Googling for the error so far hasn't produced any positive results.

I also tried enabling NTFS encryption, but the process started throwing up errors when it couldn't encrypt certain files. Presumably this is because those files are in use. Can I safely encrypt my home folder while logged in as another user (this is what I had to do in Linux)?

JAM83 · 29 Jul 2018

In order for BitLocker to work, TPM must be enabled in the BIOS.

imrazor · 29 Jul 2018

vgkfan83 said:

In order for BitLocker to work, TPM must be enabled in the BIOS.

imrazor said:

I have enabled TPM and Secure Boot in the UEFI,

As mentioned above, I have already enabled TPM in the UEFI.

imrazor · 29 Jul 2018

The problem turned out to be rEFInd, a third-party EFI bootloader that has a number of neat capabilities. Once that was removed, I was able to enable Bitlocker and encrypt my Windows drive.

The remaining problem is that I can no longer use GRUB as a boot manager. If I try to boot from GRUB, I'm prompted for my Bitlocker recovery key. After entering the 2,000 digit code I can get in, but that's a pain I'd rather avoid at every boot.

I can leave the Windows boot manager in charge, and boot straight into Windows without a Bitlocker prompt. However, to get into Linux I have to press F12 at POST at exactly the right moment, which is somewhat inconvenient. Is there any way to add Linux to the Windows boot manager without Bitlocker freaking out?

das10 · 30 Jul 2018

I don't have much experience of Linux but you could read the following article which deals with bitlocker and windows+linux dual boot.

Notes on dual-booting Linux with BitLocker Device Encryption and Secure Boot Â· Ctrl blog