How to format and use a BitLocker encrypted drive

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I started the encryption process on my blank 64GB USB stick.

The process ran for about 12 hours and stuck at 21%. I paused the BitLocker encrypting process and restarted my computer.

And then I can't unlock the drive using neither the password nor the recovery key. It's it's saying "The password enter is incorrect".

I think the encryption process might had been corrupted.

I'm now trying to format the drive and use it; however, every formatting software I try tells me that the drive is write protected.

This is the result of the command manage-bde -unlock f: -pw.

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I also tried to clear out the WriteProtect flag; however, it did not help as the USB was never marked as write protect.

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How do I format and make use of my USB stick again now?

Best Answer

Run the diskpart clean command when the bitlocked usb drive is selected as the active drive.

  1. Open a command prompt as administrator
  2. Type Diskpart
  3. Type List Disk to view all available disks.
  4. Type Select Disk #, where # is the number of the drive you want to clean. You'll get a confirmation that Drive # is selected.
  5. Type Detail Disk to view detailed information on the selected disk to verify that the correct disk is selected. If you need to select another disk, repeat steps 3 & 4. The next step will destroy all data on the selected drive so proceed at your own risk.
  6. Type Clean to completely clean the drive.

You can now close the Command Prompt window and use Windows disk management to reformat/repartition your troublesome drive.

See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490893.aspx for additional information on using DiskPart.

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