BitLocker locked my external harddrive by itself?!

Thanks Mohammed, for your reply, but it doesn't help me very much.  No point you referring me to the Microsoft help on Bitlocker, (I have read it), this is a BUG.  It is not due to me doing anything wrong.  Bitlocker locked my drive without me requesting it.  (Contrary to your assertion that Bitlocker only locks drives when requested).

I will post on the Tech forum as you suggest, but with no great hope of solution.  This needs to be reported to the relevant operating system support team, and it should be solved by Microsoft, who should get back to me with their solution.  

One final point.  If I try to do a Dir on the drive in the command prompt it says:

"The bitlocker metadata for the encrypted drive is not valid", further indicating that some sort of system error has occurred.  A question.  Since the drive can still be viewed on the 8.1 machine, if I reformat it from that machine, will it then remove the corrupted bitlocker metadata?

Thank you

Hi Yeoman,

Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Community.

I would suggest you to refer to the Microsoft help article:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows-8/bitlocker-drive-encryption

Also I suggest you to post this issue in TechNet forum we have a dedicated team with advanced tools and permissions to help you with this issue so please post you query on TechNet forum.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/home?category=w8itpro

For reference:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831507.aspx

I am afraid your information is not correct.  This same problem has now happened to me twice.

Whilst transferring files from my 8.1 machine to a seagate hdd, when I attempted to read that drive on my windows 7 machine it said it was locked by bitlocker.  I too hadn't heard of bitlockr and never locked the drive in the first place.

I could still access the drive on the 8.1 machine however so I bought another drive and was able to copy my stuff from one drive to the other on the 8.1 machinE.  This time the new drive wan't locked.  The old drive is still inaccessible except on the 8.1 machine.

The same thing has now happened again on the new drive.  It too is bit locked without me requesting it.  This is a serious bug and I am surprised you guys don't know about it.  I think it might have been caused by me unplugging the the drive without using the remove drive option on the task bar but whatever, it shouldn't have locked my drive.  

I don't think it is actually encrypted because it doesn't even ask me for a key, but it is still unavailable on another computer.  It has probably just been corrupted by 8.1

This really is a serious issue and needs to be sorted quickly.  Thanks

Hi Lena,

Thank you for the reply.

Sorry to hear about the inconvenience.

By default Bit locker will not  lock any drives unless it is locked by user.

If you still have any issues with Bit locker please do let us know and thank you for sharing this information.

Hi

I face the same problem. My drive was locked by itself, as i connected it on another computer. I never used bitlocker in the first place.

This is a serious bug that microsoft has to fix immediately