Samsung NP350V5C - unable to get bitlocker to work

Hi,

I originally posted this in the Samsung section but have been advised that this is a better location. The excellent help I have been offered so far has confirmed that the hard disc appears to be formatted correctly, thread here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/733486-samsung-np350v5c-unable-get-bitlocker-work.html

So, my problem is that I just bought the laptop in the title, upgraded to Windows 8-pro and tried to get bitlocker to work unsuccessfully.

There is no TPM chip so I followed the instructions to enable additional authentification, set a password and rebooted as required - there are clear insructions to follow in a number of places - e.g.:
BitLocker - Turn On or Off for OS Drive in Windows 8

On restart, item 16 on the instructions (BitLocker - Turn On or Off for OS Drive in Windows 8) does not happen, instead I get the error message in item 17 - "Bitlocker could not be enabled etc".

The instructions rather unhelpfully say "If the BitLocker system check failed from step 15 above, then you will see this below. Click/tap on Close. You are now finished since BitLocker was unable to encrypt the Windows 8 OS drive." Unfortunately, it doesn't explain why it has failed. Can anybody help - I've saved the recovery key to a memory stick and left that in the usb port at reboot but that made no difference.
Having an encrypted hard drive is a work requirement so I need to resolve it ... having looked at a couple of threads on this forum it looks like there are some issues going on with booting but can't see anything directly relevant to my problem.

Any help much appreciated.
Peter

 

Hi Peter, Dannemand again here the Samsung forum.

I am sorry you haven't gotten any traction with this question. Maybe not too many people use BitLocker.

Did you otherwise have any progress? Any help from Samsung or Microsoft?

 

Hi - apologies for not replying sooner.

Contacted Samsung - they politely told me to jump in a lake as it was a software problem.

Microsoft were very helpful. Their advice was to push through some MS updates and suddenly the bitlocker start-up screen appeared and all started working as expected. I'm still scratching my head a little as to how this could make a difference - I can only think that the W8Pro disc I bought was reasonably old and that it was taking a long time for all the subsequent updates to load.
I've rebooted a load of times obviously but don't understand how windows updates are scheduled or how quick/slow that process is - it was over a week of elapsed time but maybe that's more normal than I realise? I always presumed that new updates are bundled in the background ... but maybe that's my logical process management head thinking they're more organised than they actually are?

Anyway, it's working and I'm very relieved!

On a secondary note, maybe not that many people need disc encryption but bitlocker is more or less the only working windows8 solution - neither PGP/Symantec (who I used previously) or Truecrypt have a W8 solution yet and whilst I'm not familiar with other products, I don't think they do either.

 

Thank you for the update. I am very glad to hear that you got it working

I can see Samsung's position in this particular situation, installing a new OS and having problems with a pure OS feature. Although they could still be nice about it and at least TRY to help. Hey, that's what people do here...

But it is proper that Microsoft should help you. Again, they sold you that update.

Windows Updates are broken down as Critical, Important and Optional. Using the Windows Update control panel, you can configure settings for how (and whether) they automatically install. It may be set to only install Critical and Important updates, waiting for you to make a choice on the optional ones -- not all of which are needed for all users.

You finally got it working, that's what counts. Well done being persistent with this!

 

Hi Peter,

I work over at Symantec on the PGP side of the house and a coworker of mine gave me the head's about your thread because he was confused. Just wanted to let you know that we do in fact support Windows 8 for Drive Encryption.

All the best,
Joel