HELP! After BitLocker, drive no longer recognized!

[ElSel10]

Hey guys I have a very serious problem. I have a 4tb external hard drive, the LaCie 2big Quadra. I am using it in the full capacity fast mode (RAID 0).

I had quite a bit of data on it, something like 800GB if I recall. Anyway a lot of the data is stuff I'd rather people not be looking through, so I got the idea of using BitLocker to encrypt the drive (I have Windows 7 Ultimate). I had the drive connected using the eSATA connection, and I right clicked on the icon in My Computer, and enabled BitLocker encryption. I saved the recovery key to a file and I know the password as well. The process took a long time, it ran overnight. But it did complete successfully.

After it finished, I came back to the computer and the drive was fully usable. All the files were there and accessible, and the icon in My Computer showed up as BitLocker protected. So I turned off the drive and turned it on again to check and see how BitLocker would work, and to my horror, the icon in my computer no longer showed up as BitLocker protected, and it had lost the volume name as well. A message popped up saying the drive had to be formatted before it could be used.

In the BitLocker control panel, it did not show up as being BitLocker encrypted, either. I tried it on my other computer (also with Windows 7 Ultimate), and it does not even get detected on that computer anymore. Prior to encryption, the drive worked perfectly on both computers. Of coruse I have not went along with the message saying it had to be formatted. I really need to access my files! They can't be gone can they? Anybody have any ideas on what I can try here?

[msurgeon]

Lots of possibilities here. Best case scenario: you wake up and it was all a bad dream. Other possibilities not so good. If something went wrong with the encryption then this might well be terminal. Alternatively, it is very possible that one of the physical drives in the enclosure has failed. Yes, this can happen instantaneously and, depending upon what type of drives they are -Seagate, for example- it would not be that unheard of an issue. Verifying this would entail opening the enclosure and testing each drive to see if each is still functional. This may not be something you feel comfortable doing yourself. And if one of them has failed you will need to have the data professionally recovered. As a final complication, the fact that the drives are striped adds to potential recovery cost. Sorry for the pessimistic outlook. Hope I'm wrong on all counts (except the bad dream part).

[ElSel10]

I don't think the encryption has failed, after it completed, the drive was fully usable with all files accessible and the drive functioning properly.

I also doubt one of the disks failed, that just seems unlikely. But how would I go about testing them without messing up their contents? The computer I encrypted it on still recognizes the drive and properly reports the capacity and everything, it just pops up a message saying the drive now has to be formatted before use.

I noticed that while it's plugged in, I have the option in the BitLocker control panel to enable it on the drive. Is that something I would want to try? Would it reengage the encrypted the drive? Or would that make things worse?

[ElSel10]

If this is going to be a big problem, can anybody recommend some good professional data recovery options?

[msurgeon]

It is possible that the encryption is still valid but the file system has become corrupted. No harm in using a program like R-Studio to see if it can see your files (you can download demo version). If it cannot, then don't dismiss the possibility of drive failure in the external unit. It is not as unlikely a scenario as you might like to imagine.

[ElSel10]

Well how would it see the files if they are encrypted?

[networkpc3000]

are you sure all drive works fine?