This post will go over the error message “The disk is not formatted. Do you want to format now” error message you might receive when plugging in a drive that has been encrypted using “Bitlocker To Go”.
If you are getting this error message your drive is formatted using NTFS and NOT Fat/Fat32. Microsoft does not seem to support NTFS Bitlocked drives on Windows XP or Windows Vista.
Even if you format the drive with Fat/Fat32 and then re-encrypt the drive you can only READ from the drive. If you need to put other data on the drive you have to go back to a Windows 7 machine to do it. The version of Windows 7 doesn’t matter for adding files ONCE the drive has been Bitlocked. As we all know only Enterprise and Ultimate can do the original Bitlocking.
As seen in my “Everything you need to know about Bitlocker To Go” article there are several files that are used to read the large partition file on the Bitlocker drive. I figured maybe if I copy them to my XP computer and then run it when I plug in an NTFS drive that has been Bitlocked maybe I could open it that way!
You can try it yourself but I could NOT find a way to make it work.
So to sum everything up if you are getting the “Bitlocker To Go” error message “The Disk in drive X is not formatted” in Windows XP or Windows Vista the flash drive you are using is formatted as NTFS instead of Fat/Fat32!
someone says
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!
purushottam says
i have a bit locked flash drive, but no idea how was it done…n who did it….now all i want is to make it reusable…when inserted, displays “do you wish to format?” when tried to format, it doesnt get formatted. when i tried to open the drive from explorer, it says please insert disk into the drive k.
do u have any solution?
Jared Heinrichs says
I guess my frist question is how do you know the drive was bitlocked? The windows that pops up “do wish to format” can mean several things. In general what that error means is that the computer knows there is a flash drive connected to the computer. (ie. It is comunicating propperly with the device’s controller.) However if the controller doesn’t/can’t talk to the actual flash memory you will get to the same message. Unfortunately if the drive has been “bitlocked” there is no way of getting the information off the drive unless you know the password or have access to the machine/cert that it was encrypted on.
The next step to test is whether your drive is bitlocked or malfunctioning. To do this go into Disk manager and delete the whole partition on the drive. Again doing this will destroy the partition and any data on the drive. Re-create the partition and format the drive. If you can’t remove the partition or you can’t write to the drive after re-creating the partition your flash drive is dead. Hope this helps.
b.phillips says
wonderful! I have looked everywhere for an answer once I encrypted my flash drive on my Win 7 machine and tried to use it on my work win xp machine and kept getting this error.Seeing as how I am a MCSA student I should probably have known this.lol