Thursday, February 19, 2015

Bitlocker could not be enabled - Dell Latitude 7440

Sometimes it just doesn't pay to disable stuff in BIOS.  I recently had problems enabling Bitlocker on some Latitude 7440 units.  After the initial reboot the error would pop up saying that the bitlocker encryption key cannot be obtained.  So I checked the usual suspects - clearing the TPM, making sure the TPM was recognized in device manager, etc.  And then I remembered the USB settings that we'd changed to lock down the laptops more.


Specifically under System Configuration, USB Configuration, "Enable Boot Support" which had been disabled just to make sure our users wouldn't be able to boot off USB devices.  I wouldn't have equated that bitlocker error with that setting but as soon as we undid it on the laptops we were able to enable bitlocker.