Moving Bitlocker data drives to new sever OS

[smakme7757]

I presume this will work out fine, but just for the sake of playing it safe I thought I'd ask here.



I have two RAID arrays which are encrypted with Bitlocker. On the same hardware I've decided to remove the server 2012 install and put on hyper-v server core instead to free up the license for another server.



My question is if I should decrypt the Bitlocker data volumes before I move to the new OS?



The OS volume is Bitlocker encrypted so I'll be decrypting and formatting that, so my question only applies to the data volumes which reside on completely separate disks.



I can't imagine I'd run into problems unlocking the data drives once I install Bitlocker, but I just thought I'd ask 🙂

 

[Mushkins]

Personally, i'd unlock them, move them, then re-lock them just to be safe. It "should" work is never an answer i'm willing to bank on when the alternative is having a gigantic block of useless encrypted and inaccessible data.

 

[Dahak]

From what I can see on TechNet it would seem that if you move them while they are encrypted will cause a recovery scenario.

So the best bet would be as Mushkins mention is to decrypt them.

I see that you are going to do hyper-v, you may need to backup and format your data drives because you will have virtual data drives an not the raw drives available( i have not personally worked with hyper-v, but have with esxi)

 

[smakme7757]

Thanks for the replies people. I went ahead and decrypted the volumes. I agree that it's better to be safe than sorry 🙂.

I was already running Hyper-V, so my drives were already being used for vhdx files. So all should be well.

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