The Bitlocker Odyssey or How I Killed Five Hours of my Time
(…and yours if you are going to read this )
My Windows Vista System had some strange side effects and so I decided to do a reinstall. After having postponed this action many times I finally started yesterday.
First I thought it would be nice to have SP1 slipstreamed into the installation sources but it seems as if Microsoft does not support this anymore. I think they provide slipstreamed sources themselves. Still, there exits two ways to do so: the manual and the vLite way. vLite is the Vista version of nLite. Both are tools to create custom Windows Installation Sources.
Since VLite ist pretty much straight forward I decided to go that way. Still, the process takes around two hours!!! So get a can of tea (I suggest a FTGFOP Darjeeling)…
Once, this process finished I needed a tool to burn the ISO image. I like InfraRecorder which is the first decent GUI to the open source cdrtools I’ve seen.
I did the first try with maximum speed and a second one with the lowest possible speed and both burning processes finished successfully. Still, when launching the installation process I always got the error that it “Cannot find the file D:\Sources\Install.wim. Error code 0×8007000” after I entered the license key. Well, I remember we had burn issues with Vista ISOs and the solution usually was to use a different burn software and to burn at single or double speed but I got pissed and so I continued using the RTM image w/o SP1 I had. Two hours later I had a fresh Vista installation and SP1 was applied manually. And guess what? Of course I didn’t do a backup of the slipstreamed ISO I created and so I couldn’t use it inside a virtual machine to at least test if the slipstreaming process was a success.
Anyway, during installation I left around 1.5 MB of unallocated space on my hard drive because I knew BitLocker would need this as an unencrypted boot partition. But it seemed as if I didn’t leave enough space because when I startet the BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool it said it would shrink my system partition. Since I didn’t want that I directly canceled the process and checked what was wrong. This turned out to be the worst thing I could have done because it left me with an unallocated hard drive space that wasn’t enough for the BitLocker boot partition and a system partition that Vista could not shrink anymore.
Exaleading around a little bit I tried the following:
- Disabled paging and delete pagefile.sys
- Disabled hibernation and deleted hiberfil.sys
- Used JKDefrag (supposed to be able to move the NTFS MFT file)
All the above didn’t work. If you want to try yourself maybe this link is of help.
So what else could I do. Use something like Partition Magic, of course. I used the open source live CD gparted before but this time I tried Parted Magic.
And I tell you it rocks, perfect hardware discovery and after two hours I had a NTFS partition resized with gparted.
About
Originally this site was intended as a project site. The goal was to define standards for the perimeterless network using
open-source software. To be honest I simply do not have the time for such a thing. So what is left is a blog with sporadic
posts that are either helpful for myself or I think are helpful for others, too since I had a hard time finding information
on the Internet. Think of it as a knowledge base.
Ehm yes, somtimes I write down my two cents on any topic that may go through my mind at that point in time ;-)