Will Bitlocker make it impossible to read my files from my dual booting Ubuntu OS?

Question

When I activate BitLocker, I imagine that will make it impossible to read any files on my Windows partition from my Ubuntu installation. Is that correct?

Any way to not encrypt certain directories so I can access them from Ubuntu?

Answer 1

Yes.

Bitlocker is whole drive (partition) encryption, it has its own bootloader from start to finish. It is the easiest solution for encryption.

You may even have a problem booting into Ubuntu all together if your machine has a TPM chip as Bitlocker ties in to that to check integrity.

Your best bet would to be have a partition used just for moving files in between the two systems.

You may also want to take a look at using Truecrypt as this can achieve what you want very easily. Alternatively, if you want a Microsoft Solution, Microsoft have a option called EFS (Encrypting File System) that works very well and can do what you want, if not a little complicated to learn / get into.

AFAIK, EFS cannot be read from any NTFS compatible driver/app in Linux, where as you should have no problem using Truecrypt in a cross platform environment, so you could even encrypt everything and still open it up in Ubuntu.

Answer 2

Neither BitLocker or NTFS encrypted folders are supported under Linux. Only way (that I can think of) that you can have encrypted content accessible from both Windows and Linux is to use TrueCrypt.

Answer 3

Alternatively you might also try an encrypted EXT 3 filesystem that you can access from windows using FreeOTFE. I tried Truecrypt before, but especially in combination with SVN, which causes a lot of file accesses during an update, truecrypt was very slow.