I had an issue today with trying to create an image of a brand-new Windows 10 laptop (HP EliteBook x360 in case you were wondering). When running Clonezilla, the main Windows partition, formatted as plain ol’ NTFS, was identified by Clonezilla as RAW, and it would have taken more than an hour and 240 GB to create an image, for a partition that only had around 30 GB used. As it turns out, newer machines with Windows 10 and a TPM have BitLocker enabled by default, even though there is no password for the end-user. This is straight out of the box. What this means is that Clonezilla, which can’t understand BitLocker encrypted partitions, can’t recognise or unlock the partition to create an image. Fortunately there’s a very quick and easy way to turn the encryption off with manage-bde (Manage BitLocker Drive Encryption) This handy utility, which must be run from a CMD prompt with elevated privileges, will show the BitLocker status of all partitions on the drive via:
manage-bde -status
This showed that the C: drive had BitLocker 2.0 enabled using XTS-AES 128 encryption and that it was encrypting only the used space on the drive. To turn it off, simply run:
manage-bde -off c:
This immediately begins decryption of the partition and you can view the progress using:
manage-bde -status c:
Once it reported that 0% of the drive was encrypted and that encryption was disabled, I was then able to boot into Clonezilla and create an image of the drive as usual.