Re-format bit locked drive without the encryption key?

[Louiss97]

Hi All.
As a reward for being a good boy, my company has given me a new laptop. In fact, we get them every 2 years whether we want them or not. Something to do with the warranty and support service I gather.

Usually our old ones go back for recycling - and they literally just shred the whole machine , but due to COVID the service is not operating we've been told to dispose of them locally at a regional office if possible - or just to hang on to them. instrument ringtones

The thing is, my previous laptop is still really good. It has an i7 processor, 1TB M2 SSD, FHD touchscreen 4 hours battery life, the lot. I'm keen therefore to re-purpose it until I get told to hand it in, so thought about doing a fresh install and using it as a family laptop for a while.

The drive is Bit Locked, but I am not interested in retaining any data on it, as I transferred everything over when my new laptop arrived. Before I shell out on a cable to connect the drive to my personal PC, is it possible to format a drive without access to the decryption key?
Sonneries d'alarmes, Musique relaxante

 

[ubuysa]

Does diskpart's clean work on bitlocked drives I wonder? Or diskpart's delete partition override? I've never tried but it's worth a go.

If not, boot a Linux live USB stick and used gparted to delete all partitions.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Yo

Hi All.
As a reward for being a good boy, my company has given me a new laptop. In fact, we get them every 2 years whether we want them or not. Something to do with the warranty and support service I gather.

Usually our old ones go back for recycling - and they literally just shred the whole machine , but due to COVID the service is not operating we've been told to dispose of them locally at a regional office if possible - or just to hang on to them.

The thing is, my previous laptop is still really good. It has an i7 processor, 1TB M2 SSD, FHD touchscreen 4 hours battery life, the lot. I'm keen therefore to re-purpose it until I get told to hand it in, so thought about doing a fresh install and using it as a family laptop for a while.

The drive is Bit Locked, but I am not interested in retaining any data on it, as I transferred everything over when my new laptop arrived. Before I shell out on a cable to connect the drive to my personal PC, is it possible to format a drive without access to the decryption key?

I believe @ubuysa is on to something here:


Press SHIFT-F10 or hit 'repair' in from the Windows installation to open up the command line, then execute the diskpart command and delete the partition, e.g.: list disk, select disk 0 or any other identifying the correct disk, list partition, select partition 1, or the encrypted one , in case there are multiple partitions, then delete partition override.

You can then resume the install procedure normally to repartition and format the drive.

 

[Grumpywurzel]

Has your company locked down the bios as well? The piece of junk uber lightweight HP laptop I've got from work, just boots straight into Bitlocker and if i try to access the bios in the 1 nano second window it just flans me 😭. Just wanted to have a little look around, honest

 

[Stephen M]

No need to install a Linux distro, Gparted Live should do the job from a USB: https://gparted.org/livecd.php

 

[Tony1044]

You can format a bitlocked drive in another machine. You bin off the partitions and reformat.

 

[Gomjaba]

It's an M2 so you'd have to find a PC with a controller. Anyway, if it's a good machine and Essentially free, I'd just eBay an m2, Swap them and keep the old one in case they do want it back.