Question Use of Bitlocker with automatic unlock

[CrispyBytes]

Hi,
The system drive on my Windows 10 Pro PC is password protected, but all of the data drives have "Automatically unlock this drive on this computer"

I understand that this works because the "unlock credentials" for the data drives are stored on the system drive, which can then be used when the system boots up and the system drive password is entered.

I do have a backup of the recovery keys, but I am just wondering if the data drives could be removed from the PC and unlocked on another PC with the same password as the system drive (with the recovery key only being needed if that password is forgotten).

Are the "unlock credentials" that are stored on the system drive, individual encryption keys, or are they just a copy of the system drive password, which is then used to unlock the data drives at startup?

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

[Viking2121]

If it's the OS drive, it will probably ask you for the encryption key before it can even boot, but if its just a data drive, it's just going to ask for a password, you enter it and off you go. You can suspend Bitlocker and then move the drive to the other PC and it will work, but it won't let you enable BitLocker on the said drive until its unencrypted and encrypted or moved back to the other PC, at least that's the problem I had on my 6TB drive.

The auto-unlock won't transfer over to the other PC, you would have to setup bitlocker again on the new PC for that to work, and I believe you have to decrypt and encrypt to make that work on the new PC.

Good Luck!