Monday, October 9, 2017

BitLocker Triggering Every Reboot - One Possible Cause and it's Solution

We had a few machines that were triggering BitLocker every time they rebooted. We tracked the issue down to the fact that SSD were formatted as MBR, and the BIOS mode in System Info was showing as legacy.

(We had 4 brand new machines with the same hardware and the only difference was that the 2 that were working were GPT and UEFI, and the 2 that weren't were MBR and Legacy)

This is how I fixed it:

  1. I suspended Bitlocker but did not turn it off (I tried one computer with turning it off and it wasn't good... had to rebuild the machine to get the TPM working with bitlocker)
  2. I converted the SSD to GPT (Read my directions here)
  3. Made sure I set the BIOS options to UEFI
  4. Booted back into windows, and bitlocker wasn't working. When I tried to manually reactivate bitlocker it gave an error saying "The system cannot find the file specified"
  5. Rename or Delete the  REAgent.xml file (in C:\Windows\System32\Recovery) to fix the error from Step 4
  6. Manually activate BitLocker again and it works. 
  7. Reboot a couple of times to test. Everything works! No more triggering of Bitlocker.