Bitlocker - Extend Volume
After extending a bitlocker volume, the HDD is constantly active and the CPU is about 25% busy. I can only assume that bitlocker is initializing the extended volume. Disk Management won't present a screen so I'm pretty sure that it thinks it's doing something. This is going on for a very long time. Rebooting does not help as it seems to pick up where it left off. Is there any way to confirm that this is the case and what percentage is complete?
July 27th, 2009 11:26pm

If you select ManageBitLocker in the Control Panel this should show the current status of BitLocker in the OS.If that doesn't show any usefull information, you can try the following:1. Start the Command Prompt running as Administrator2. Type the following command: manage-bde -statusThis should tell you the current status of BitLocker.Otherwise start the Resource Manager from Windows Task Manager and check what process is hammering your disk.Ray
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July 28th, 2009 4:40am

Ray, thanks for the questions. process manager - System 46% CPU accross dual core Resource Manager - Disk tab - c:\$bitmap 20MB/sec read 57 MB/sec write - c:\$logfile 4MB/sec rea 4 MB/sec write Manage bitlocker does not start, it just hangs waiting to start. Probably because of all the disk activity. manage-bde -status does not respond. It starts but just hangs, waiting to give a response. To eliminate other thigns interferring, I uninstalled AVG, disabled Windows Indexer, and finally booted to safe mode. But, the problem persists.
July 28th, 2009 7:35am

Barrie,It looks like you have an issue with the file system. Can you runChkDsk and checkwhat it says?Ray
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July 29th, 2009 4:01pm

Indeed, I have run ChkDsk several times, including using the /R parameter last nite. No errors were reported.I really suspect it's a bitlocker issue. The strange thing is that although I extended the drive partition (Extend Volume), the Resource Manager shows that individual files are being processed by "System". It looks as though bitlocker is re-encrypting the drive as part of the extend volume process. The odd thing is that if this were the case, with the HDD throughput reported by Resource Manager (~80MB/s overall) it shouldn't take that long to re-encrypt about 120GB of files on a 400GB partition. The only other thing that comes to mind is that the partition is formated using 512 byte sectors which may introducesomewhat moreoverhead for bitlocker than the usual NTFS sector size of 2K, but it shouldn't be this nasty.Thanks for the ideas so far and any further thoughts or remedies are welcome.
July 29th, 2009 10:13pm

Hi Barrie, (I work for Microsoft, but am speaking as an individual user, not as Microsoft. At the same time, I'm drawing on 10+ years of kernel-mode storage driver experience, as former dev owner of DISK.SYS....) Just ran into something similar myself. I extended my OS partition, which had bitlocker enabled. Bitlocker does, indeed, appear to automatically detect this and automatically start encrypting the new space that was added. As part of encryption, Bitlocker leaves only 6GB of free space, allocating the rest for immediate encryption. This immediate encryption means lots of sectors on your HDD are going to be written to. This is processor intensive, but even more disk-intensive. It also means that hard drive recovery methods should be considered.... Hard drives, unless targeted for server use, now have really extended error recovery times. A single sector read or write can take up to three minutes on some drive models, typically when the drive detects an error on the media, and the pre-allocated spare sectors created during manufacturing are running low. For an intro into this mayhem, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery or search for "TLER". So, it is quite possible that BitLocker is sending one or more writes to your hard drive, and the drive is "hanging" the system by entering a deep recovery mode. Some of the combinations of variables could result in a full core being pegged during this process. If you still experience this, I recommend finding and downloading your hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic tools for your drive. Finally, try to temporarily suspend the encryption process. Let the following run overnight, in case you can get Bitlocker to pause, you will have less pain while running other tools. Manage-BDE -pause C: Just don't forget to re-enable Bitlocker when you're done! Manage-BDE -resume C: Hope that helps.... Registered Patent Agent | LCA - Patents | Microsoft
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July 6th, 2011 6:15am

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