Innovative Technology Weblog

Now that we are talking about BitLocker I just want to share something Steve Riley “showed” at Tech-ED IT-Forum 2006

Well this a bit of a little secret because it not supported by Microsoft but it works nicely. If you want to use BitLocker on another partition then your partition where the OS resides on you can do this. So no GUI what so ever just plane old school command line kicking stuff. There is no GUI supporting this feature.

To run it:

1. Open an elevated command prompt
2. Change to %WINDIR%\System32
3. Enter cscript manage-bde.wsf

For the curious, “bde” expands to “BitLocker drive encryption.”

With no parameters, the output is:

Description:
    Configures BitLocker Drive Encryption on disk volumes.

Parameter List:
    -status     Provides information about BitLocker-capable volumes.
    -on         Encrypts the volume and turns BitLocker protection on.
    -off        Decrypts the volume and turns BitLocker protection off.
    -pause      Pauses encryption or decryption.
    -resume     Resumes encryption or decryption.
    -lock       Prevents access to BitLocker-encrypted data.
    -unlock     Allows access to BitLocker-encrypted data.
    -autounlock Manages automatic unlocking of data volumes.
    -protectors Manages protection methods for the encryption key.
    -tpm        Configures the computer’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
    -ForceRecovery or -fr
                Forces a BitLocker-protected OS to recover on restarts.
    -ComputerName or -cn
                Runs on another computer. Examples: “ComputerX”, “127.0.0.1″
    -? or /?    Displays brief help. Example: “-ParameterSet -?”
    -Help or -h Displays complete help. Example: “-ParameterSet -h”

Examples:
    manage-bde -status
    manage-bde -on C: -RecoveryPassword -RecoveryKey F:\
    manage-bde -unlock E: -RecoveryKey F:\84E151C1…7A62067A512.bek

So thanks Steve R. for this information.

See ya,

Jeroen

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 11:41 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.