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A few months ago my dear collegue Paul Slijkhuis asked the community ” is there a way to activate bitlocker from scratch after you install out-of-the-box Vista?“

Finaly i got the answer howto repartition the Vista drive and seperate the boot volume from the system volume and make the new boot volume bootable. Folow these steps carefully and allways make a bacup of you system (just incase….. murphy is coming to visit you)

1. First open diskmanager and right click on the current C Drive, choose Shrink and Shrink the partition 1500Mb (or more in case you want to put some extra troubleshooting tools on this partition)
2. Create a new Primairy Partition, Format it NTFS and make it the active partition (ignore all warnings)
3. Also it’s a good idea to label this disk BitLocker (Windows PE and recovery will swap driveletters, this way you can identify the BitLocker boot drive)
4. Put you Windows Vista Installation DVD in the DVD Drive and perform a boot from DVD
5. After WindowsPE booted, choose next on the language screen
6. Choose “Repair your computer” on the Install Screen
7. Click “No” on auto repair and then “Next”
8. In the menu choose “Command Prompt”
9. On the command promt (You notice the driveletters are swapped) go to the D: Drive (This is your Vista Installation)
10. Use the folowing command to copy the boot folder from the Vista Volume to the Bitlocker Volume :
    XCOPY /E D:\Boot C:\Boot /Y
    Choose that the destination is a Folder
11. Use the folowing command to copy the bootmanager from the Vista Volume to the Bitlocker Volume :
    XCOPY /H D:\Bootmgr C:\
12. Reboot your Computer

Now you will see that Vista is booting again and it’s possible to activate Bitlocker.

 Have a great one, Erik Luppes

 

P.S. Words are that the BitLocker Team @ Microsoft is working on a util that will do this for you in a user friendly way, until then use this workarround and post a comment if this was helpfull to you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 1:01 pm and is filed under General, Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.