Type Select Disk 0 (or whatever disk it is for your application) Choose the disk that should be the “system disk”.) Type List Disk – (The list of disks will appear. Type DiskPart – (The DiskPart prompt will appear.) To verify what drive letter has been assigned to the drive, you can use DiskPart. Note: Even though your drive may be C: when it’s booted up, it might not be in the Recovery Environment if you have multiple disks connected to your machine. To do that you type manage-bde -protectors -disable C:

bek on a thumb drive, that’s much easier.Īfter that, I suspended BitLocker so that I wouldn’t have to unlock it after every reboot. Note: You can also use the -RecoveryPassoword option to enter the 48 character recovery key in, but if you have the. I was able to “unlock” BitLocker ( manage-bde -unlock C: -RecoveryKey PathToExternalKeyFile) and browse the disk just fine, so I knew that the hardware wasn’t the issue. After that, I booted to the recovery environment via the Windows 7 install media and pulled up the command prompt. So the first thing that I did was unplug my data drive to try to isolate the issue, since I knew that no boot data lived there. My first instinct was that the drive failed, since it’s happened to me so many other times. Hopefully at least some part of this can help at least one other person.Īnyhow, back to the problem – the machine won’t boot. Also, note that what I wrote below is a gross summary of what I actually did.

Also, though, I’m a “Platforms” engineer, my specialty isn’t “setup”, so this took me a bit longer than I was happy about to fix it, which is why I’m discussing it here.

On the way back up, it essentially said no bootable disk, press F1 to continue. Essentially all I did was a reboot to install updates. Now, a month and a half later during the Thanksgiving holiday, I was finally able to look into the issue. Since the machine wasn’t “mission critical”, it had to wait. Right before my trip to Japan one of my Desktop machines “died”.

Bitlocker drive preparation tool