Hi,

Just recently we had a requirement to enable bitlocker on our development machines. Unfortunately you can’t use bitlocker on hard drive that of type DYNAMIC. So initially we were advised to have our machines reformatted. We all know that having our development machines reformatted will result to downtime on development task so I tried searching the web for solution and I found one.

As always for a peace of mind you may backup your files just in case you did something that is not part of the steps.

 

Summary

1. Delete volume of the drive using Diskpart and convert drive to basic
2. Use Gparted to recreate the volume
3. Enable bitlocker

Details

1. Create a Gparted bootable disk
   1. Download the latest YUMI Multiboot creator
   2. Download the latest GParted ISO either the x64 or the one that is compatible to your machine
   3. Insert the USB drive to your machine
   4. Run YUMI
   5. On Step 1 select the USB drive and check on Format drive preferably as FAT32
   6. On Step 2 select Gparted
   7. On Step 3 locate the downloaded ISO file from Step 1.2
   8. Click Create and wait for the USB drive to be created successfully
   9. Keep it for now as we will use it later
2. Create a local administrator
   1. This is a different from a domain admin that is created for corporate machine this is an account that binded only to your machine
   2. To create open Computer Management
   3. Navigate to Local User admin Groups > Users
   4. Right click and select New User
   5. Fill up the following accordingly
      1. User name
      2. Full Name
      3. Password
      4. Confirm Password
      5. User must change password at next logon : UNCHECKED
   6. Double click on the newly created account and select the Member of Tab
   7. Click Add and search for Administrators
3. Boot your machine to command prompt, on our Machine we are using Windows 10 and below are the steps to boot to the command prompt
   1. On your task bar go to All Settings
   2. Select Update & Security
   3. Select Recovery
   4. Under Advance startup click on Restart Now
   5. Your machine will restart
   6. On the said screen navigate to find the Command Prompt usually it is found by:
      1. Troubleshooting > Advanced > Command prompt
      2. Then select the local admin you have created on Step #2
   7. Type in Diskpart
   8. Type in  list disk take note of the disk you want to convert to basic
   9. Type in select disk <disknumber>
   10. Type in detail disk take note of the details for later reference #3.10
   11. This time we will delete all the volume of the said disk by
       1. select volume <volumenumber>
       2. delete volume
       3. Repeat step untill all volume has been deleted
   12. When all volumes has been deleted you may now convert that selected disk on #3.10 by typing convert basic
   13. Now our disk is converted to basic we need to reboot our machine and boot unto our USB live drive that we have created on Step #1
4. After booting up on the USB Drive just look for the Gparted and just press enter until you see the desktop of Gparted
   1. Open GParted app and make sure that the drive we wanted to convert to basic is showing unallocated as we have deleted the volume on Step #3
   2. Now open terminal and type the following steps
      1. sudo -s
      2. testdisk
         1. On the testdisk follow this steps
            1. Select No Log.
            2. Select the disk drive you want to recover, e.g. /dev/sdc.
            3. Select your partition table type. Usually it’s Intel.
            4. Select Analyse and Quick Search.
            5. If you get asked whether your partition was created under Vista, answer yes/no.
            6. Your drive will be analysed and you will see a list of all found partitions. If you know what you are doing, you can edit the list, but usually that list is already the volume we’ve got on Step #3.10 and if yes just press Enter.
            7. On the next screen you have the option to either perform a second Deeper Search, or Write the current partition table to disk. If the quick search, which we checked if it matched our volume on Step #3.10, was successful, choose Write.
      3. Close and Open the GParted app to verify the changes
      4. If all is well you can now exit GParted and boot again
5. Your machine will now boot properly and your drive will now be on Basic type.
6. You can now enable bitlocker as needed.

 

Hope it helped you as it did to me.

 

God Bless!

Thanks,
Thomie

 

Referrences:

https://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/convert-dynamic-disk-to-basic-disk.htm

https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

https://gparted.org/download.php

https://ubuverse.com/recover-a-disk-partition-with-testdisk-and-gparted-live/