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I've used USB connected Bitlocker encrypted drives over the years and have never had any issues unlocking them on other machines. However I have some new Toshiba 8 TB drives that I can't get any Windows machine to recognize other than the machine where Bitlocker was originally enabled. In Disk Management they show up as Healthy (GPT Protective Partition) and don't even show the correct capacity. What would cause this?

Scott Wilson
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  • How large are the other, working disks – are any of them larger than 2TB? Do you have a different USB adapter that you could try, or a direct SATA connection? This sounds extremely like your current USB-SATA adapter is doing the "4k sector emulation" thing for large drives, causing everything to show up in the wrong place. – u1686_grawity Mar 31 '23 at 06:52
  • (That is, I'm fairly sure it's the same situation as in https://superuser.com/q/1649962 .) – u1686_grawity Mar 31 '23 at 06:53
  • The one I use most often is a Western Digital Passport with 2.6 TB partition and never had any issues with other machines. Others that I have used without issues were 2 TB or less though. I actually did try connecting one via SATA but no luck there either. If it's the 4k sector emulation thing how would I avoid that? I'm pretty sure I selected GPT when I initialized them. – Scott Wilson Mar 31 '23 at 07:47
  • Did you originally initialize them when connected via SATA, or via the same USB adapter, or a different one? Can you check using something like [HxD](https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/) to see if there's still indication of a GPT header in any of the first few sectors, and if so, which sector? (The GPT will be recognizable by the text "EFI PART" at its beginning.) – u1686_grawity Mar 31 '23 at 07:50
  • I've checked 2 out of 4 of the drives so far and I see EFI PART in plain text on one of them on a machine that doesn't recognize it, the other is on the machine that enabled Bitlocker but I don't see EFI PART. I'll check the others when I get home. I initialized all the drives via the USB adapters, so maybe I should initialize them on a SATA interface? – Scott Wilson Mar 31 '23 at 22:06
  • So I tried reinitializing one of the drives from scratch on a SATA interface but still no dice. Something weird about these Toshiba drives or maybe it's the size? I'd try using VeraCrypt but you can't automatically mount the drives without using VeraCrypt for your OS drive which I don't want since I already use BitLocker for that. – Scott Wilson Apr 05 '23 at 23:25
  • So I think I've figured out what is causing the problem. I started over by wiping the drives out and re-encrypted them but before I started backing up files to them I tested the drives out on multiple machines to make sure other machines could see them and unlock them. They worked fine until I ran the backups then once the drives were filled they're weren't recognized on other machines. In Disk Management they just show us a GPT Protective Partition with the size of 2048 GB and the rest is unallocated. Now how to solve this problem. – Scott Wilson Apr 28 '23 at 16:12

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