I have a BitLocker encrypted external drive that I needed to read from a Windows Server 2012. When I connected it to the server and right-click on the drive I don’t see the Unlock Drive option from the context menu like I usually see on my Windows 10 computer. So, what to do?
How to enable BitLocker encryption on Windows Server 2012
The reason I don’t see the Unlock Drive option is that the BitLocker feature is not enabled by default on a newly installed Windows Server 2012.
To enable the feature, open Server Manager and launch Add Roles and Features wizard.
Select BitLocker Drive Encryption option in Features stage and click Install.
It takes a few moment to get it installed. You will need to restart the server to have the change taken in place.
Once installed and restarted, you will see the Unlock Drive option appeared in the context menu.
And you will be able to unlock the drive by providing the password. If you need to access the same encrypted drive repeatedly, you can check “Automatically unlock on this PC” option.
The other way around this is to use the PowerShell cmdlet if you don’t want to enable BitLocker feature on the server.
The syntax of the cmdlet Unlock-BitLocker is something like this.
Unlock-BitLocker [-MountPoint] <String[]> -Password <SecureString> [-WhatIf] [-Confirm] [<CommonParameters>]