hey guys - on my hard-drive i had a partition that was encrypted with bitlocker - after a restart today the partition now just shows as free space, as though it was never encrypted and now needs formatting in order to use - a disk check with a partition manager came back clean. the other partition on the drive (c) is fine (im typing this from it) i didnt have anything important on that partition, but such a thing still makes me a bit nervous - anyone have similar experiences? thanks
If you ever find out what happened please come back here and let us know. I have NEVER used bitlocker so I would be of no help. I could take a few guesses based on what other encryption software has done producing the same symptoms. Not much profit in wild speculation. I am curious if you took an update recently and whether or not you have a MBR backup from "before" the problem developed. It would prove interesting to examine if the MBR's partition table had somehow been manipulated by a M$ update. If you do have one try comparing bytes 447-510 of the 512 byte MBR. On the other hand you may have deployed different alignment but investigating would still be simple to do. Its a curious data crash since bitlocker is created and supported by M$.
palancar - I never did know what happened - I just went ahead and formatted the partition and re-encrypted it with bitlocker - as i'd said, fortunately I didn't have anything important on that partition. I had not downloaded any windows updates near to that time. I had been downloading some tools from the sysinternals site (to that partition) when I had to reboot my system while the downloads were ongoing - that may have played a hand in the corruption of the bitlockered partition - I knew my downloads would be corrupted, but didn't think the entire partition would be. I think I had to do a hard reboot due to my system locking up for some other unrelated reasons, that may well have been the cause of the loss of my partition. In any case, food for thought
