Drive D BitLocked on Windows 10 Home Edition

skcusime · 28 Oct 2023

I had the need to use Macrium to restore a full backup on my wife's computer, a Lenovo A540 with Windows 10 22H2 19045.3570 Home Edition. The computer has 2 drives - SSD with C: UEFI system, and a HDD she uses for data.
My computer (that I'm writing this on) also has Windows 10 22H2 but is older and has MBR setup.
The thumb drive used to do the restore was a bootable Macrium created on my computer, the MBR setup with Windows 10 Pro.
While Macrium worked fine and restored all partition to the SSD, the HDD now wants a bitlocker code on every boot. I retrieved the key from Microsoft, but because the system is Windows 10 Home, bitlocker is not supported so I cannot turn it off.
I can unlock the drive each boot, but that's a pain.
How can I solve this issue? The HDD only contains data in several folders, so is it possible to copy all data to an external drive, reformat the drive, and reinstall the data.
Remember the drive specs shown for me are not the computer with the problem!

dalchina · 29 Oct 2023

Hi, the obvious answer would seem to be to do what you suggest.

What puzzles me from what you describe is how bitlocker came into play at all. I can't see that being a consequence of having restored an image (congratulations on using disk imaging, by the way!).

Was the HDD previously used on a PC with Win 10 Pro with bitlocker in use, for example? Clearly you know how to unlock the drive.

skcusime · 29 Oct 2023

dalchina said:

Hi, the obvious answer would seem to be to do what you suggest.

What puzzles me from what you describe is how bitlocker came into play at all. I can't see that being a consequence of having restored an image (congratulations on using disk imaging, by the way!).

Was the HDD previously used on a PC with Win 10 Pro with bitlocker in use, for example? Clearly you know how to unlock the drive.

No, all new.

I too can't understand how this happened except it's the first time I've had to restore a backup, used Macrium that was created on Win 10 Pro, and it was locked on first use after the backup. The other strange thing is drive D was not restored!

cereberus · 29 Oct 2023

dalchina said:

Hi, the obvious answer would seem to be to do what you suggest.

What puzzles me from what you describe is how bitlocker came into play at all. I can't see that being a consequence of having restored an image (congratulations on using disk imaging, by the way!).

Was the HDD previously used on a PC with Win 10 Pro with bitlocker in use, for example? Clearly you know how to unlock the drive.

I am pretty certain the pc had bitlocker device encryption set up which encrypts all drives.

Provided OP has the recovery password, they should be able to un-bitlock the drive using standard bitlock commands. They work on Home version afaik.

How to Unlock BitLocker Drives in Windows 10

skcusime · 15 Dec 2023

Just in case anyone else has the same problem, I eventually resolved the issue by upgrading the computer to Pro with a key bought online for $AU9.99 (about US$6.00) and it activated without an issue (so far at least). Decrypted the drive, which took about 12 hours, and turned off bitlocker!