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I have a 3TB hard drive that I wiped and created a new NTFS partition the full size of the drive and then chose to do a Bitlocker full drive encryption of the more or less empty drive.

I any case after hours of encryption, it got stuck at 99.9%. I found this answer: Full drive encryption with Bitlocker freezes at 99.9%

This seemed to help, however, my question is then, what happens to the space that you expanded the partition into?

Why can't I just create a 1GB partition, encrypt that, which would only take a few seconds, then expand that 1GB volume to full size of the drive? How can it still be encrypted?

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  • According to here when you extend a volume the space it is extended into is encrypted. ("Bitlocker does, indeed, appear to automatically detect this and automatically start encrypting the new space that was added."). It is an old quote though and although from MS employee not official documentation.
    – lx07
    Mar 1, 2020 at 13:08
  • Thanks for that. Probably best info out there. I wasn't able to find anything. Well it turns out that two of my 3TB Seagate HDD's were failing which is why they wouldn't fully encrypt. Then I saw Backblaze report showing the older 3TB HDD's had as much as 43% failure rate! I had a spare 4TB that encrypted rather quickly and fully no problem.
    – HTWingNut
    Mar 1, 2020 at 14:23

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