bitlockericonhero-100301743-largeWe recently enabled Bitlocker in the install process of all laptops in the company I work for, and everything seem to work fine..

However one of our local IT supporters had a problem preparing a new pc, the thing is that Bitlocker encrypts in the background so the installation continue even while bitlocker is encrypting – and here the problem arose, see Bitlocker is clever – it know that it is a waste to encrypt empty space so what it does is to start by reserving all but 6gb of diskspace (as seen below), Bitlocker now encrypts the USED part of the disk and then proceed to write garbage on the reserved portion of the disk (the “free” part) – once done it again free the reserved part and the entire free disk space is again available to the user.

bitlocker2

Well it so happens that our IT Supporters sometime need to install additional software after the initial installation of windows, and then it may become a problem with the only 6gb free space.

What to do, well it is actually quite easy you just pause the encryption process which will free up the reserved part, and once done preparing the pc you restart the encryption process.

To pause the Bitlocker encryption you goto an elevated command prompt and type;

manage-bde –pause driveletter :

once done with whatever you needed done you restart the process with this command;

manage-bde –resume driveletter :

https://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/ee449438(v=ws.10).aspx#BKMK_FreeSpace