Wife's laptop motherboard failed, her hard dive is encrypted. Can I put that hard drive in an enclosure and connect it to her new computer?

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Wife's laptop motherboard failed, her hard dive is encrypted. Can I put that hard drive in an enclosure and connect it to her new computer?

Anonymous

Title pretty much says it all.

The old hard drive would be connected to the new computer via a USB cord,

I do have the 48-digit number recovery key, so the idea is that the new computer could unencrypt the old hard and needed information could then be passed on to the new computer's hard drive.

Can it be done that way?

Or, is there a better way of dealing with this problem?

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Answer 1

Hi Tom,

Yes you can do that, and it will ask for the bitlocker key - it will be the key for her drive, so I assume it would be the key you found in her account, if her computer was set up using her account back then.

Once you have it opened with the key, it is probably best to remove the encryption. To do so, you can run Command Prompt in admin mode, run this command:

manage-bde -off D:

(Replace the drive letter with whatever it is when you connect her drive on your computer).

Give it time to finish. When it is finished, the prompt should return to the new row. Then you can run this command to verify the status:

manage-bde -status D: