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I have a USB drive that has been encrypted using Bitlocker on my Host machine. Unfortunately, I can't mount it on my Windows VM. Even though the USB drivers can be detected, the disk cannot.

I tried enabling TPM, encrypting my C just in case. But it can be detected on another Host machine. Any ideas?

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  • have you installed any extension packs (if thats what its called) that allows direct USB device passthrough? Perhaps the VM is passing the disk volume through instead of the raw USB device...
    – QuickishFM
    Oct 14, 2019 at 9:47
  • I don't think the TPM can be pass-through to the VM. Mounting is perhaps possible using Hyper-V, as described here and using a key storage drive.
    – harrymc
    Oct 14, 2019 at 10:27
  • So I cannot use my usb disk on the VM?
    – OscarCY
    Oct 14, 2019 at 10:37

1 Answer 1

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You cannot use a Bitlocker encrypted USB disk on a VMWare VM, except with difficulty and some limitations.

First, I don't know of any method of pass-through of the TPM to the emulated VM (at least not on the VMWare Workstation platform).

You could use Bitlocker without a TPM, which is somewhat painful. You will find the details in the article
How to Use BitLocker Without a Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

Using Hyper-V instead of VMWare, this becomes possible, but is again not simple and requires a key storage USB drive. You will find the details in the article
Yes, you can: Enabling BitLocker encryption for Generation 1 Hyper-V VMs.

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  • We can add a TPM device to an encrypted VM in VMWare workstation 16.X. (Confirmed Startup Disk Encryption + TPM in Virtual Machine Works). Unsure about external drives, but i think it's worth a try now that TPM can be added.
    – PathToLife
    Jan 23, 2022 at 5:36

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