Ubuntu – Use (Windows) BitLocker-encrypted drive on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

crossplatformencryptionwindows

How could I mount my BitLocker encrypted drive on Ubuntu?

I have checked the Wine website, and it had no BitLocker support, and I have no idea how to install Dislocker on my computer.

I can not remove the encryption because my school computers use Windows OS instead of Linux OS. Also because I installed Ubuntu because my Windows OS was not working.

Best Answer

Since Ubuntu 18.04, Dislocker is available in the Ubuntu Universe packages. It can be installed using

sudo apt install dislocker

You may need to

sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt update

First, we make two folders, /media/bitlocker and /media/mount:

sudo mkdir /media/bitlocker /media/mount

Then, download and then extract Dislocker.

You'll want to install some needed packages:

sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev

To install it, we need to change directory to the dislocker folder:

cd dislocker

Depending on your operating system, you'll need to choose one of these:

  • For Debian-like distos based on Debian Jessie or Ubuntu 14.04 or older:

     aptitude install gcc cmake make libfuse-dev libpolarssl-dev ruby-dev

  • For Debian-like distos based on Debian Stretch or Ubuntu 16.04 or later:

     aptitude install gcc cmake make libfuse-dev libmbedtls-dev ruby-dev

Now we finally install dislocker:

cmake .
make
sudo make install

Here, we need to find our partition so we dont erase all of our drives accidentally:

sudo fdisk -l

If we have a recovery password, we can decrypt it using this:

sudo dislocker -r -V /dev/sdaX -p1536987-000000-000000-000000-000000-000000-000000-000000 -- /media/bitlocker

PS: You should replace 1536987-000000-000000-000000-000000-000000-000000-000000 with your recovery password.

If you know your password, we can just use that too:

sudo dislocker -r -V /dev/sdaX -uPASSWORD -- /media/bitlocker

Pssst: Replace PASSWORD with your User password. Attention: keep the u before the password! So, if your password is UbuntuLover, you shall use uUbuntuLover after the hyphen.

If your disk is mounted to sdb, use option sdb1.

If you are decrypting with a recovery file then use "path/to/.BEK" instead:

sudo dislocker-fuse -V /dev/sdcX -f /media/user/usb-drive/00000000-0X0X-0XX0-XXX0-XXXX0XXX00XX.BEK -- /media/bitlocker

Now, we finally mount our file:

sudo -i
cd /media/bitlocker
mount -r -o loop dislocker-file /media/mount

(If the mount above fails with "Permission denied" add the -r option and try again.)

Now you can move to the /media/mount folder and see your decrypted data.

Read the source for more information and details.

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