How to recover formatted drive encrypted with BitLocker

[vinodtanwar85]

I had encrypted my C:/ drive with bitlocker. It worked fine for 5 months.
After 5 months it was giving problems, so I took help from brother which suggested to reimage the machine with Windows 7.

I did the same, however during installation of Win7 it showed drive C:/ and Drive D:/. I deleted the Drive C:/ and its gone, tried to refresh the windows however still was not there, so now installed Win7 on only remaining drive.

I had 500 GB of hard disk divided in 2 partitions. Now I only see 224 GB in My Computer.

I don't want to recover my data from encrypted drive; however I need that space of 250 GB.

 

[rusabus]

In Windows, you can click on the start button and then right-click on Computer and click "manage." This will bring up the computer management console. Under Storage, click Disk Management. Your computer probably only has one physical hard drive, which will be listed here as Disk 0. By default, Windows creates a 100MB "system" partition which contains the Windows boot manager and recovery tools and partitions the rest of the space as the C: drive. When you open Disk Management, you will probably see another partition on Disk 0 that you can delete. Once deleted, you can extend the C: drive to take all the unused space.

Just be sure you don't delete the System partition or the C: partition where you have your current copy of Windows installed. (I'm not sure if the disk management snapin will let you delete those two partitions, but one can never be too careful here.)

--Russel

 

[vinodtanwar85]

Thanks Russel,

Sorry that I didn't add that this deleted partition (C:/ of 250 GB) is not visible in Disk Management. I tried to find it as unallocated space however Disk Management just shows Primary disk in which I have installed windows 7, which of 250 gb and the other one is of "System" of 100 MB.

Is it possible to delete all the drives with Windows XP setup and recreate the partitions? As Win 7 installation setup and Disk Management just shows 250 gb of space.

 

[Hawkeye22]

If you forgot the password, you are out of luck. There is no way to decrpyt without the password. The partition that isn't showing up under disk management is probably needed by bitlocker to manage the volume.

 

[rusabus]

Do you know the make and model of hard drive you have?

As far as deleting the partitions with Windows XP setup . . . certainly worth a try. A live Linux CD may also be able to delete the encrypted partition. I'd recommend trying partedmagic http://partedmagic.com/doku.php