Bitlocker wont turn on

I was hoping to avoid all this hassle as I don't have a TPM equipped PC but
I don't like XP wiping all my Vista restore points.
So I bit the bullet, plugged in my USB flash drive and started up the
Bitlocker procedures as described in MSFT Technet (
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa905065.aspx ) and got
right to the final point - Control Panel/Security/Bitlocker Drive
Encryption/Turn on.......and I get an error when the check starts that there
isn't enough space. There's loads of space. Image of errors at
Photobuicket here:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v732/Ex-Brit/Purrint001.jpg
I have 77.5gb free out 98.1gb on drive M
The only thing I haven't yet done is set the boot to USB first in my BIOS.
That was going to be my next step.

 

I was hoping to avoid all this hassle as I don't have a TPM equipped PC but

Is M: your boot volume? Bitlocker is designed to protect your boot volume
only on Windows Vista, although you can get around that with the command-line
tool (manage-bde.wsf). On Longhorn Server you can protect non-boot volumes as
well.

 

M: is my Vista Ultimate partition if that's what you mean.
I have 2 hard drives.
1 (250gb non-raid) C: XP Pro, D: XP Pro, E: Backup F: Spare G: Spare
2 (250gb non-raid) M: Vista N: Vista backup
I have 2 USB drives -
1 I: Ativa U3 2gb flash
2 V: Maxtor 1-Touch ll 200gb
It allowed me to use either for key storage in the setup but then gave that
error.
--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate fully updated
P4 D865GBFL HT @ 3.0ghz 4.0gb DDR 700gb HD
ATI Radeon 9550 Graphics
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 4 Audio

 

P.S. I ommitted SATA from the HDD descr. but they aren't RAID setup.

--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate fully updated
P4 D865GBFL HT @ 3.0ghz 4.0gb DDR 700gb HD
ATI Radeon 9550 Graphics
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 4 Audio

 

Bottom line, C: is your "system" volume (always; that's where is \BootMgr)
and M: is your "boot" volume (when you run Vista on it.)
Beware that's MS' terminology, you may encounter the reverse elsewhere. Also
beware that the "boot volume" is known as the content of the "%SystemDrive%"
environement variable...


How much space on C: ? Doc tells you are required to have 50 MB free on the
system volume (in addition to all other requirements) to be able to use
BitLocker.


Antoine

 

C: Has 53.6gb available out of 79gb.

--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate fully updated
P4 D865GBFL HT @ 3.0ghz 4.0gb DDR 700gb HD
ATI Radeon 9550 Graphics
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 4 Audio

 

I just noticed:

a.. A BIOS setting to boot first from the hard drive, not the USB or CD
drives.
For any test that includes the USB flash drive, your BIOS must be configured
to read and write to a USB flash drive during startup.

Boot first from a hard drive...which hard drive..that could cause problems
haveing 2 HDD's ??




--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate fully updated
P4 D865GBFL HT @ 3.0ghz 4.0gb DDR 700gb HD
ATI Radeon 9550 Graphics
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 4 Audio

 

It makes no dofference putting my 1st HD as first boot...same problem.

 

M: is my Vista Ultimate partition if that's what you mean.

Honestly, I don't know how you keep any of that straight. That's the most
complicated partitioning scheme I've seen for a long time. I would try to
remove some of the complexity, a little bit at a time. Start out by removing
the external drives and see what happens.

You also need to look at what your system partition is, the one with the
boot manager. It seems like it is C:, but it is unclear.

BitLocker really was not designed for that complicated a deployment.

 

The boot manager is def. C: - I think I'll give up on this one and just let
XP continue eating my Vista SR.
Yes the setup is strange...but mostly consists of 2 XPs and 1 Vista...others
are all for backups and storage etc. Not as bad as it seems, although if I
tell you that I also have 4 DVD burners.....LOL....forget it!
Thanks for all your help.
I fired off a note to Microsoft asking if they have ever thought of a patch
for XP to stop this carnivorous behaviour....;-)
I'll probably get the usual non-committal reply from somewhere east of the
Urals.

--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate fully updated
P4 D865GBFL HT @ 3.0ghz 4.0gb DDR 700gb HD
ATI Radeon 9550 Graphics
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 4 Audio

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "XP continue eating my Vista SR", do you want
to expand on that?

The original error "not enough disk space" will occur if
(a) The Vista disk is nearly full (< 3G space I think it is)
or (b) There's not enough contigious space to store certain data structures
on the disk
or maybe (c) Disk corruption confusing the BitLocker driver

Now that said, given the size of the disks, I wouldn't expect to get this
error. Can you try the command-line tool instead (manage-bde) and see if
that is reporting the same error.
-
Jamie Hunter [MS]

 

"XP continue eating my Vista SR" means XP wiping out Vista's System restore
points in a dual boot scenario such as mine. I really am surprised that
this hasn't been addressed instead of forcing us to use various other
measures.
Re: the disk space issue, I don't understand why it's doing that either.
Re: command line....can you expand, I'm not familiar with that procedure?

--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate
P4 HT @ 3.00ghz, 4.0gb RAM, 700gb HDD

 

After doing some research with Google, tried the cscript manage-bde...didn't
work either.

--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate
P4 HT @ 3.00ghz, 4.0gb RAM, 700gb HDD

 

Microsoft are hoping to include a cure for this in XP SP3...no promises
though.

--
Peter
Toronto, Canada
XP Pro SP2 x 2 + Vista Ultimate fully updated
P4 D865GBFL HT @ 3.0ghz 4.0gb DDR 700gb HD
Sapphire Radeon X1650 Pro Graphics
Creative Soundblaster Audigy 4 Audio

 

[ Rearranged the post to make it readable ]

Should be enough


OK, another try: you said N: is "Vista backup". Is it a _clone_ of M:
(byte-for-byte copy, i.e. same SID), or is it just another installation?

If the former, perhaps this is the reason that is begging BitLocker.
Again, this is just a thought.


Antoine