Is my 850 Pro encrypted correctly?

ffrank

ffrank

ffrank

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When I purchased this drive I went through the (painful) steps of enabling UEFI and Samsung hardware encryption. After my second install on Windows all appeared perfect - Samsung Magician reports encrypted, and on turning on the PC bitlocker prompts me for a password.

I have just added a 1Tb Evo 850, so have gone through the enable for encryption/secure erase/enable bitlocker steps on this drive.

All looks great, drive shows as encrypted.

The issue is - when I went into Bitlocker to enable on my new drive, I noticed the previous drive (850 pro boot drive) is showing as Bitlocker being Off. If I click to enable Bitlocker it offers me the option to encrypt free space or whole drive- which worries me it is talking about software encryption.

Is this normal? If you use Hardware based encryption on the boot drive, how should it display in Windows?

As I am asked for the bitlocker password on boot, it appears to be enabled - i just don't remember if it used to say bitlocker enabled in windows also - and if so why it no longer does!

It's a bit worrying it doesn't show as enabled in powershell:
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Thanks, yes that's exactly what I did other than I didn't use partition magic (you can use /s on the Samsung utility to make it work OK if the font doesn't load).

I'm wondering if I didn't actually turn bitlocker back on after a reinstall of windows 10 - so perhaps the boot password has stuck but windows isn't realising the drive is encrypted (as to windows it's not encrypted as soon as the password has been entered, as there is no software decryption required).
 
Please answer my initial question.

I'm guessing you didn't remove all the partitions from the drive before you reinstalled the OS, which explains why the BitLocker boot loader is still present. In the articles linked above, they start with a completely empty drive.
 
I think I did answer you sorry - I said I performed those actions exactly but maybe I didn't re-enable boot locker after the most recent install.

I normally do remove the partitions as opposed to just formatting, but if I didn't do that as you've said that would explain the password remaining.

Question is now - what will happen if I re-enable bitlocker on this drive. I assume it will just overwrite the existing bitlocker keys etc. I may take a backup of C and give it a go.
 
ffrank said:
Question is now - what will happen if I re-enable bitlocker on this drive. I assume it will just overwrite the existing bitlocker keys etc. I may take a backup of C and give it a go.
Click to expand...

I don't think anything bad will happen, but agree re backup just in case.

Are you able to post a screenshot of the Disk Management screen?
 
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