5

I didn't manage to easily find this while googling.

Officially Windows 10 Home does not support BitLocker GUI and that's fine, they don't want home users to lose access to their data.. however.. if you manage small business IT infrastructure you must find a way on how to protect company data even on devices that come with Windows 10 Home.

Improve this question
0

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
12

So here we go..

Prerequisites

  • Disk with GPT (GUID Partition Table)
  • Dedicated TPM module (v1.2+) or enabled Intel PTT in BIOS (not sure if AMD has such alternative)

Now how to check this ?

(Run all commands from now on in cmd.exe as admin)

powershell Get-Disk 0 | findstr GPT && echo This is a GPT system disk!
powershell Get-WmiObject -Namespace "root/cimv2/security/microsofttpm" -Class WIN32_tpm | findstr "IsActivated IsEnabled IsOwned SpecVersion"

This must return 3 True values and spec version 1.2 or higher (first number).

If your device meets the prerequisites

Access windows 10 Advanced Startup Options (press reboot while holding shift button)

go in to Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > Command Prompt

Login with your account that has admin privileges and type this to start encryption:

manage-bde -on c: -used

Once this is done, close the command prompt and continue to windows where perform following:

manage-bde c: -protectors -add -rp -tpm

manage-bde -protectors -enable c:

manage-bde -protectors -get c: > %UserProfile%\Desktop\BitLocker-Recovery-Key.txt

!!! Backup your BitLocker-Recovery-Key.txt which will be located on your desktop.

And voila, data on your system drive will soon be encrypted and protected

To check status of encryption use manage-bde -status

Improve this answer
5
  • This does not work on Windows 10 Home as at 2021-03-22. Running manage-bde -on c: -used will show Windows 10 Home is not supported.
    – Leow Kah Man
    Mar 22, 2021 at 0:34
  • 1
    It does, i just did it successfully.
    – KO the typo
    Apr 10, 2021 at 17:20
  • 1
    Thank you for this. If you google "you need a microsoft account to finish encrypting this device", you won't find any good support to enabling BitLocker without an MS account, but these commands allow you to do it and store your own recovery key without a Microsoft account. Thanks!
    – vinhboy
    Apr 30, 2021 at 6:25
  • 1
    FYI, for anyone coming to this thread, going into "Advanced Startup Options" is crucial for turning on Bitlocker on Windows 10 Home. If you try to do it in normal mode, it will say "This version of Windows does not support this feature of BitLocker"
    – vinhboy
    Apr 30, 2021 at 6:37
  • my pc satisfied all the requirements you mentioned, even the encryption from the Advanced Startup Option was complete but after that, I couldn't set any protector from commands you mentioned (manage-bde c: -protectors -add -rp -tpm ), it throws the error that it's not supported.
    – cheems
    Jul 20, 2021 at 5:40
1

The way I do this is to encrypt the hard drive with Windows 10 Home on a Windows 10 Pro machine.

Either unplug the Windows 10 home drive from the PC then plug it into a PC or the other way around and just select which drive to boot, both works for me.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .