Question how do I fix my half Bitlocked drive ?

[droner inventer]

I have a 500GB External HDD which is 420GB full and I wanted to encrypt it.
So I decided to use Bitlocker because reviews from the internet says it’s the best. I left it to be encrypted overnight and when I woke up, it was stuck at 65% so I paused the encryption and went about my day.

Later that day i plug in the external HDD, the Bitlocker pops up and i insert my password and the resume menu opens, i click on it, i try to keep myself busy and 30 mins later the drive is still only at 65% encrypted.
I go to click pause again so i can try another usb port, it suddeny crashes, it brings up the not responding error, so I manually the drive and everything goes away; the bitlocker windows.

I plug it in into another usb port and the same popup comes again, this time i use the recovery key and when i go to click enter, it freezes, and its taken over 10 minutes just to go back to the encryption window, but now its still stuck at 65%, the drive all of my backups including my schoolwork and google gemini says it might be due to some bad sectors on my drive or the bitlocker met, adata has issues. Ive also tried the command prompt methods but nothing is working.

Also all the while ive been using it, the drive has fallen a few times over the past few years, heights that really aren't that critically damaging, and Hard Disk Ssentinel says the drive is 100% healthy the last time I checked it 4 days ago.

Right now im checking it, its still stuck at 65% and the drive just started clicking. Is there really a way to remove the Bitlocker even if the drive hasn't completed encrypting, or a way to force it to complete the encryption process??

I would really appreciate any help. Thank you.

 

[evermorex76]

The drive is almost certainly failing physically and you've just been lucky about not encountering those bad blocks during your normal usage, but now Bitlocker is reading and writing every block. Open the Bitlocker settings screen and se if you can just turn off Bitlocker and decrypt, or if you can pause or suspend it then you may be able to just copy all your data to another drive. I wouldn't want to keep using that drive if it was my data, encrypted or not. There is a high probability you're going to encounter some corrupted files when you try to copy the data.

 

[Moonstick2]

What model drive is this? How is it powered?

I have an external harddrive(500gb)...the drive all of my backups including my schoolwork...

Does this mean that the external drive has backups of your important data, and other copies of that data exist on the internal drive of your PC (for instance)?

If so then I would suggest simply getting a brand new external drive and backing up to that before spending more time seeing if this multiply-dropped clicking hard drive is salvageable.

If not, and you decided to try encrypting the single copy of all your important data and you can't simply undo the partial encryption with BitLocker alone then your only choice is to try some specific data recovery software, and chances are you'll have to pay. UFS Explorer offers a try-before-you-buy which lets you see if it will work for you before having to pay about $60/€60 for a personal licence. Others might have alternative software suggestions.

 

[evermorex76]

If not, and you decided to try encrypting the single copy of all your important data and you can't simply undo the partial encryption with BitLocker alone then your only choice is to try some specific data recovery software, and chances are you'll have to pay. UFS Explorer offers a try-before-you-buy which lets you see if it will work for you before having to pay about $60/€60 for a personal licence. Others might have alternative software suggestions.

I missed the bit about it clicking. I wouldn't suggest using ANY further software and not plugging it in period, if this is the only copy of essential data. Every time you plug it in, you risk those read/write heads crashing onto the platters and literally scraping your data into trash. It needs to go to a recovery specialist like FlashBack Data (just the one name I know from work). They can pull the platters out of the drive if necessary and mount them in another case with all the other hardware, and do a full read of the bare sectors to get the information off. They likely can also decrypt the partially-encrypted data for you, since you have the recovery key which is what allows it to be read on other machines. There's a good chance you've lost data at this point anyway. I doubt any consumer software is going to be designed to let you read partially-encrypted data from a drive and try to figure out what is encrypted and what is not, and decrypt as needed. Recovery providers will probably charge about the same as UFS Explorer, but they will not charge you if they don't recover at least some data.

 

[rgd1101]

all of my backups

so you have the original? get another hdd and do another set of backup

 

[evermorex76]

so you have the original? get another hdd and do another set of backup

Based on the wording of the OP, I assumed "backup" was a euphemism for archive. As in "I backed things up to this drive then deleted them because I didn't actively need them anymore, and now I need them."

 

[rgd1101]

donno. I don't like to assume