Bitlocker corrupted, missing volume, now 3TB drive is a 768GB drive

Question

Even after Bitlocker had completed encrypting the drive, I restarted the next day, and the drive didn't mount or even show as a Bitlocker drive.

Now it shows the capacity as 768GB (3TB drive). And this is the drive, not a volume (i.e. /disk3), in the Computer Management utility.

I've tried using a GParted live CD, but the GParted executable would close after several error messages. Should I also try DBAN?

Should I just buy a new drive? If Bitlocker said the encryption process completed, and then it doesn't mount or appear as a volume on the next restart, is that a bad sign?

Answer 1

Chances are Bitlocker (or perhaps something else) has installed a buggy driver on your computer. The symptom of a 3TB disk appearing to be ~760GB is most often caused by a driver with a 32-bit limitation on sector addressing. It's conceivable that your data are still intact, but you'll need to locate and replace the offending driver. You may also need to fix some partition table and/or filesystem data structures. If your data are unimportant, you can wipe the disk clean, but you'll still need to find and replace the offending driver (assuming you're booting from a different disk). Using DBAN is overkill; simply repartitioning the disk (once you've got a working driver) should be sufficient. If you try again with Bitlocker, be sure to be ready to replace the offending driver as soon as it's installed, lest this problem recur.