I have an external RAID 5 Array that uses Hardware RAID with an eSATA connection. Four 1GB drives are in the enclosure, so there is 2.7GB accessible. I have about 1GB of data on the array. Last week, I encrypted the drive with Bitlocker as I have done with other drives. While Bitlocker was running, I was able to access the drive without issue (view files on it, copy files from it). After many hours, Bitlocker finished and Windows no longer recognized the drive. I do have the Bitlocker key, which I printed out while Bitlocker was running. The drive shows up as E:/ and Windows wants to format it (I clicked cancel). Disk management says it is a RAW drive. What are my options to retrieve the data? I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate.

I solved my problem. I was able to decrypt my drive using the Windows 7 repair-bde tool. For some reason, Windows couldn't find the bitlocker meta data after the drive was fully encrypted. (I'm very glad I printed out the key before the encryption process finished!) Anyway, when the meta data is lost, encrypted drives will show up as a RAW disk in disk manager. The repair-bde tool required that I have a second drive to decrypt the drive contents to (thank goodness a 3TB USB 3.0 drive is easy to find at BestBuy!), but otherwise the process was easy.