I'm running Windows Vista SP 2. My Windows OS drive is bitlocker encrypted. I have a Complete PC Backup of the OS drive on a secondary drive also bitlocker encrypted. I want to replace the OS drive with a large one and then do a Complete PC Restore from the backup on the secondary bitlocker encrypted drive. What is the correct procedure to do this restore from the image on the bitlocker encrypted backup drive?

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I had the same question, and this post was the closest thing that I could find to an answer so I went ahead and tried this over the weekend just to see what would happen.

I Bitlockered an external drive, created a system image and a recovery disc, booted into the disc and was prompted as part of the recovery process to unlock the Bitlockered drive. All in all it worked flawlessly without me having to type anything on the command line or really deviate from the normal recovery process.

You can find the details of my experiment here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprosecurity/thread/6cbc202b-094b-48ff-b4d6-486f3821c604

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Awesome :) Thanks! – ne0sonic Nov 17 '10 at 12:35
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Wow, you don't make it easy!

I am not sure if there is an easier way of doing this, however this is how I would acomplish it.

If you inserted the recovery disk, click cancel to get out of Complete PC Restore and click Command Prompt

For this to work, you need to know your recovery key. From within Windows, you can create a new one by using the Bitlocker management tools.

To interact with a bitlocker encrypted drive from Windows PE, use the manage-bde.wsf file located at %systemroot%\system32\

The command you want is

cscript c:\windows\system32\manage-bde.wsf -unlock d: -RecoveryKey c:\blabla.bek

Where c:\ is your system drive, d: is the drive to unlcok and c:\blabla.bek is that backup key file.

I would recommend that you put both the manage-bde.wsf and recovery key file on a USB flash drive or somewhere unencrypted so that you can easily use it.

Next, go back to the selection menu and you should be able to go back to complete PC Restore and the drive should be readable. Hope this helps and please leave feedback.

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I hope to give this a try today or tomorrow. I'll post whether or not I was successful. – ne0sonic Apr 15 '10 at 12:18
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