Skip to content

The Dummy Programmer

Stories of daily programming

  • Home
  • The Dummy Programmer Robot
    • Overview
    • Version history & downloads
    • Tutorials
      • TDP Robot – The basics
      • A simple SQL Server backup solution
      • A simple SQL Server backup solution – A next step
  • My other dummy projects
  • Games
    • Space Y: An Asteroids clone
  • Services
    • What’s my user agent
    • What’s my IP address
  • About
  • Toggle search form

Encrypt a Windows drive with Bitlocker

Posted on April 21, 2019May 9, 2019 By

Today I want to show you how to encrypt a Windows drive. Why should  you encrypt a drive? Basically to prevent your data from being read by unauthorized persons, that may happen for example if your laptop or external USB drive is stolen.

So if you want to encrypt your drive, Bitlocker is your friend.

But what is Bitlocker?

Bitlocker is a Windows feature available in various Windows versions, among them Windows 10 Pro, and unfortunately not available in Windows 10 Home. You can use it to encrypt your Windows boot drive or an external USB drive.

In our example we will use it to configure an external USB drive.

 

We will check togheter each single configuration step.

Once you have connected your USB drive, click on the “This PC” icon on desktop, and then right click on the drive you want to encrypt. We want to encrypt the drive “Maxtor (D:)”. So right click the corresponding icon and in the context menu click on “Turn on BitLocker”.

Start Bitlocker configuration

 

A wizard will start asking you to choose the password that will be used to encrypt the drive:

Select a password

Once the password has been chosen, you can click “Next”. In the next step of the wizard you have to select how to store your recovery key. As explained in the window, the recovery key allows you to decrypt your file even if forget your password.

I usually select the option “Save to a file” and keep the file in a safe place.

Choose the recovery key

 

In the next step you have to select how much of your drive you want to encrypt, as you can see in the following screenshot:

Select how much of your drive you want encrypt

In my opinion the option “Encrypt used disk space only (faster and best for new PCs and drives)” is fine in most cases. But keep in mind that this option make possible to recover the files deleted before the encryption of the drive.

Now you have to choose which encryption mode you want to use:

Choose encryption mode

Since we are encrypting a removable drive I choose the option “Compatible mode (best for drives that can be moved from this device)” to maximize compatibility when I move the drive to another PC. I suggest to use the first option if you encrypt a fixed drive.

In the next step you only have to click “Start encrypting” to begin the encryption of the drive.Confirm the job

…. and then wait some time….

Drive encryption in progress...

Consider that, depending on how full the disk is, you may have to wait a few hours…

Completed the encryption, if you look at your drive list, you will se a padlock near your encrypted drive.

Encrypted drive now has a padlock

If you double click the drive, you will be asked to insert the password to unlock the drive:

Enter password to unlock the drive

 

Insert your password to unlock the drive.

After that you will be able to access your data.

Bitlocker, Encryption, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Server

Post navigation

Previous Post: Search a string in stored procedures, functions and views in a SQL Server database
Next Post: Lock a Bitlocker drive again after unlocking

Related Posts

Capture screen using C# C#
Configure a PHP development environment in Windows (part 2 of 4) PHP
Error message: User account restriction error Task scheduler
Lock a Bitlocker drive again after unlocking Bitlocker
One shot secret function: what’s that? Encryption
Create a folder starting with dot in Windows Windows

Search

Related posts

  • Lock a Bitlocker drive again after unlocking
  • Upgrading from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro
  • Windows 10 search no more working!!
  • Searching files and file content in Windows

Categories

  • .NET 6 (1)
  • AJAX (1)
  • Android (2)
  • Apache (4)
  • ASP.NET (9)
  • ASP.NET MVC (3)
  • Avalonia UI (1)
  • BCP (1)
  • Bitlocker (2)
  • C# (14)
  • CentOS (4)
  • ClosedXML (1)
  • CLR (1)
  • DNS (1)
  • Encryption (3)
  • Excel (2)
  • FuelPHP (3)
  • Games (2)
  • Google Chrome (1)
  • GSuite (1)
  • HTML (1)
  • Imagick (2)
  • Javascript (1)
  • Kindle (1)
  • LAMP (3)
  • Linux (6)
  • MariaDB (2)
  • Mathematics (2)
  • MySql (4)
  • NPOI (1)
  • Office 365 (1)
  • Perl (1)
  • PHP (6)
  • Programming (1)
  • Remote desktop (1)
  • SFTP (2)
  • Sockets (3)
  • Sql Server (18)
  • Sql Server 2016 (14)
  • Sql Server 2019 (1)
  • SSL (2)
  • Task scheduler (1)
  • Telerik ASP.NET AJAX (2)
  • The Dummy Programmer Chat (2)
  • The Dummy Programmer Robot (6)
  • Threading (5)
  • Tools (1)
  • TPL (3)
  • TypeScript (3)
  • Ubuntu (4)
  • Virtualization software (3)
  • Visual Studio (1)
  • Visual Studio Code (2)
  • Web fonts (1)
  • Web programming (6)
  • Windows (12)
  • Windows 10 (15)
  • Windows Forms (1)
  • Windows Server (6)

Copyright © 2023 The Dummy Programmer | Privacy Policy | Terms of use |

Powered by PressBook Masonry Dark