Bitlocker not encrypting document partition (Windows 10 Pro)

I've turned on Bitlocker on my laptop. It doesn't seem to have encrypted all of my logical drives, and for a couple of them it doesn't give me the option.

I have a 1 TB hybrid drive which currently has 4 partitions: C, E, F, and a recovery partition. As far as I recall, I created 3 of these myself: C for my OS, E for most of my documents, and the recovery partition, all of which existed before I turned on Bitlocker. I believe Bitlocker created F when it encrypted C, but I wasn't really paying attention. I don't recall creating it myself.

C was encrypted initially when I turned Bitlocker on. F, which it notes to be a "fixed data drive", it allowed me to encrypt afterwards. E, the largest partition, with most of my documents, doesn't show up as a drive in the Bitlocker management window. Nor does the recovery partition, and unlike C and F, neither E nor the recovery partition say "Bitlocker Encrypted" in the Disk Management window.

How do I encrypt E? And is it possible to encrypt the recovery partition?

Aaron said:

I believe Bitlocker created F when it encrypted C, but I wasn't really paying attention.

If you didn't have a system partition then enabling bitlocker would do this. It needs something unencrypted to boot from. It should not have a drive letter assigned though.

Aaron said:

And is it possible to encrypt the recovery partition?

No it isn't - recovery wouldn't work. There is no point anyway - it is only Microsoft stuff, not your data. Similarly you can't encrypt your EFI or System partitions.

Aaron said:

How do I encrypt E?

Normally in file explorer, right click > manage bitlocker and turn it on. Certainly you should be able to encrypt E and certainly you have to do it separately from C. There is a tutorial here if you didn't see it already Turn On or Off BitLocker for Fixed Data Drives in Windows 10 Windows 10 Security System Tutorials

I'm assuming that E is a primary partition on the same physical drive (or another internal one). Please post a picture of disk management though to confirm as perhaps when you say "logical drive" you mean mbr extended partition.

You need to expand the columns before posting the picture so no descriptions are truncated in the "Status" column at the top. Try to make it look like the picture below. This is from a legacy BIOS Lenovo laptop - you can see C and D volumes are encrypted, System Reserved and recovery partition (I decided to name mine "Rescue" for some reason) are not.

Thanks for the replies. Here are the drives shown on my computer:



And here's what's shown as available for encryption by bitlocker:




Thoughts?

BTW, consistent with the above, the right-click menu in File Explorer doesn't display any option to manage BitLocker for my E drive partition, only for my C drive.

Thanks very much; I noticed the "system" designation sometime after posting and was about to come back and say something about it. I'll give your advice a try and report back (or ask for assistance if necessary).

Okay, so I removed the recovery partition, and tried to turn that into the system/boot partition with EasyBCD. It seemed to move the boot files, but maybe I missed a step, as my computer couldn't find the OS when I restarted. Thanks to Easy Recovery Essentials (EasyRE, best $20 I ever spent), and some more fooling around, I got to this point:





Curiously, EasyRE deleted the F drive partition, which, as I mentioned, I hadn't remembered creating anyway.

So, in spite of the disappearance of F, everything seems more or less in order. BitLocker shows as available to encrypt both the C and the E drives. Except that when I try to encrypt the C drive, after BitLocker checks to make sure the drive meets its criteria, I get this:





I think my initial problem has been solved. Any help on this next issue would be greatly appreciated. Should I start a new thread?

I'm currently looking into restoring winre.wim, in case that's the issue, as I've found reference to this file being necessary, and my computer says it doesn't currently exist. Between me removing the recovery partition and EasyRE removing the mysterious F drive partition, maybe I got rid of the Windows Recovery Environment. (I'm sort of flying blind in all of this.)

I'm officially at a loss, but I'll mark this solved for the original problem.