The title is the question.
I am now enctypting a 107 GB partition and it takes ages. I am dying to know what would happen if the encryption was stopped by, let's say, a thermal shutdown or if the power went off?
I'd rather not try it myself, so I am asking you. (I hope it did not happen to you!)
And, if this happens, how can I get it fixed?
3 Answers
I found this: BitLocker Drive Encryption in Windows 7: Frequently Asked Questions
According to Microsoft TechNet, you would be just fine.
1This happened to me. I hard-reset the computer half way through decrypting, and when Windows came back up, it tried to resume decryption. It failed almost immediately with an error saying to run CHKDSK /R. After running that, the BitLocker decryption resumed and completed, without me even needing to restart the computer. There was no data loss, and I didn't have to repair anything besides the CHKDSK repair.
It would partially corrupt your disk, nothing less, nothing more. It's important to defer the process before shutting down/restarting, gracefully or otherwise, as otherwise quite literally half your disk will be encrypted, and half won't. That's not a good situation to recover from, especially since it will be likely encrypting on the fly whilst it encrypts the partition.
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