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Many consumer notebooks come without Trusted Platform Modules (TPM), which BitLocker uses to store encryption keys so that users can boot into Windows from an encrypted system volume without entering a password or needing to have an additional device, such as USB key, that holds the volume’s encryption key. In this article, I’ll show you how to modify local policy to allow users to encrypt the system volume when there is no TPM.
If you’ve ever tried to encrypt a data volume in Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012, you’ll know there isn’t any special hardware requirement. You can configure the drive to be unlocked using a password or USB key.
If you decide to encrypt the system volume with no TPM, you’ll receive an error stating that you need to enable the feature in policy. This is to stop users from accidentally locking themselves out of the system completely, and to make sure users understand that without a TPM, BitLocker on the system volume adds some inconvenience to the boot process.
Before we can encrypt the system volume, we need to enable the additional authentication startup policy in Windows.
Now that we’ve turned on addition authentication at startup, we can enable BitLocker on the system volume.
At this point, if your drive isn’t already prepared for BitLocker, which might be the case if you didn’t do a fresh install of Windows 8, you will be prompted to allow the wizard to make the necessary partition changes to the drive to support BitLocker.
When the computer restarts, you’ll be prompted to enter a password or provide the USB stick with the encryption key. Once the OS has booted and verified that the volume can be unlocked without using the recovery key, Windows will start to encrypt the drive.
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