Use BitLocker Repair Tool to Recover Encrypted Drive in Windows

zx8346 · 08 Feb 2022

Brink said:

Hello,

Could be an issue or corruption on the output disk.

If you have another drive the same size or larger than the source, try option 2 again on it to see if can finish without the output drive being RAW.

Thanks @Brink.

The output drive is in fact brand new but was formatted as exFAT before data was decrypted into per Option #2, whereas the original source drive was NTFS (which i don't think is the reason that has caused the issue).

I was able to scan and "recover" data off of the output drive using R-Studio but most of the files were either out of order without proper file structure or still unable to be opened. However, the total actual size of the output files came close to the drive size of the original encrypted drive, and the files were sort of visible in R-Studio after the recovery process (although cannot be opened). I suspect the MFT files had been incorrectly decrypted in the metafiles (can be seen in the screen capture below) by the decryption process or every salvaged file together with the MFT files should be copied into a 3rd drive one more time so as to reorganize the new file system.

Any thoughts ?

Thanks.

Use BitLocker Repair Tool to Recover Encrypted Drive in Windows-capture.jpg

Brink · 08 Feb 2022

zx8346 said:

Thanks @Brink.

The output drive is in fact brand new but was formatted as exFAT before data was decrypted into per Option #2, whereas the original source drive was NTFS (which i don't think is the reason that has caused the issue).

I was able to scan and "recover" data off of the output drive using R-Studio but most of the files were either out of order without proper file structure or still unable to be opened. However, the total actual size of the output files came close to the drive size of the original encrypted drive, and the files were sort of visible in R-Studio after the recovery process (although cannot be opened). I suspect the MFT files had been incorrectly decrypted in the metafiles (can be seen in the screen capture below) by the decryption process or every salvaged file together with the MFT files should be copied into a 3rd drive one more time so as to reorganize the new file system.

Any thoughts ?

Thanks.

The output drive will automatically get wiped and formatted during the recovery process, so it wouldn't normally matter how you had it formatted before.

If the source drive is still in good condition, you could try the recovery again to see if you have a better outcome in case it was a one time glitch causing the corruption.