Good day,

I was busy decrypting a drive when there was a power failure. After the power was restored, I was happy to see that the decryption process continued once I turned on the PC. It was short lived, as the decryption subsequently paused stating: "This disk has one or more errors. Run chkdsk /r"

The problem is that when I try to run chkdsk, it gives me the following error: "The type of the file system is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives."

This is an internal drive (not the boot drive) that was formatted as NTFS and then bitlocker was applied to the entire drive (not just the part that was used)

Please advise how I can get the decryption to resume, or how to get CHKDSK to scan the drive. At this stage I can access the drive, but then it gives me a "cyclic redundancy check" error.

• Edited by Willie Koegelenberg Sunday, August 30, 2015 6:56 PM spelling mistake

Yeah, I have tried that, which simply opens the bitlocker window that states the decryption is paused because of the errors.

I think I will need something that can fix the errors, even though the drive is in RAW format. In other words, something that will do the job that chkdsk is supposed to do.

• Edited by Willie Koegelenberg Monday, August 31, 2015 1:55 PM

Hi Deason,

Thank you for the reply. I have looked into these type of tools, but did not find any joy out of it. The main reason being that the ones that looked promising does not come with a "trial" and I would not know if it will work until I try it. Most of the others would not work for encrypted drives.

I think at this stage I'm going to have to wave the data goodbye. As a last resort, it was suggested that I try to inspect the bitlocker metadata to try and determine where the decryption is getting stuck. Although I do not believe the problem is in the metadata, but simply that bitlocker cannot read the drive due to bad sectors. These bad sectors cannot be corrected, because chkdsk reports the drive as RAW and I cannot convert the RAW drive to NTFS, because it is encrypted.

I guess this is a prime example of being royally screwed!

Regards,

Willie.

• Edited by Willie Koegelenberg 19 hours 18 minutes ago
• Proposed as answer by Deason WuMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator 6 hours 25 minutes ago
• Marked as answer by Michael ShaoMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator 4 hours 43 minutes ago

Hi Deason,

Thank you for the reply. I have looked into these type of tools, but did not find any joy out of it. The main reason being that the ones that looked promising does not come with a "trial" and I would not know if it will work until I try it. Most of the others would not work for encrypted drives.

I think at this stage I'm going to have to wave the data goodbye. As a last resort, it was suggested that I try to inspect the bitlocker metadata to try and determine where the decryption is getting stuck. Although I do not believe the problem is in the metadata, but simply that bitlocker cannot read the drive due to bad sectors. These bad sectors cannot be corrected, because chkdsk reports the drive as RAW and I cannot convert the RAW drive to NTFS, because it is encrypted.

I guess this is a prime example of being royally screwed!

Regards,

Willie.

• Edited by Willie Koegelenberg Wednesday, September 09, 2015 12:02 PM
• Proposed as answer by Deason WuMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Thursday, September 10, 2015 12:54 AM
• Marked as answer by Michael ShaoMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Thursday, September 10, 2015 2:36 AM