Open BitLocker Drive on Linux - Easy Step-by-Step

Hey guys, what is up everyone? Today I have another tutorial for you. Today we are looking at how to unlock a BitLocker encrypted hard drive or USB drive on Linux

If you searched for this video you probably already have a purpose to use your USB drive or an encryption on your USB drive

But for those who don't I want to give a short example what would be a use for that

So if you are like me and you use a couple of different operating systems as your daily drivers like Windows and Linux and you use a password database to store your passwords, specifically if this password database is on a USB drive, you probably want to have this USB drive encrypted and you probably want to use this USB drive on Windows and on Linux

I did a little bit of research beforehand to find the easiest solution for that problem

and the easiest solution really was using BitLocker. There are existing some Linux tools where you can encrypt a drive on Linux

but then you cannot open it on Windows. And there are a couple of encryption tools that work on Windows but don't work on Linux

The easiest way to do that is simply BitLocker. So if you don't have a BitLocker encrypted drive yet

just simply plug in your USB drive in your computer right click it and turn on BitLocker

It takes a couple of seconds. Then you click user password to unlock the drive

and it has a minimum password requirement. I don't exactly know which that is

It's written here but there's nothing written about the length. So I just go for something secure

Alright, next. and I highly recommend you save this recovery key to a safe location that you have access to

because if you lose your password and if you lose those recovery key you can throw your

USB drive away I'm just gonna save it where I'm gonna save it wherever

just save it right here so what the hell is this save it on the desktop click next select encrypt use disk space only if it's a new drive and select

encrypt entire drive if it's already a drive with a lot of files on them and stuff like that so it's

self-explanatory and choose compatible compatible mode that's what i usually use and it's for removable drives because you probably are using a removable drive for that

and click on start encrypting this should go quite fast yeah because the drive is empty All right Then we have a file on here which is called our secret

All right. So let's go ahead and try to unlock this drive on Linux

For this demonstration, I'm going to use Linux Mint. The steps work on all Debian based distributions

So whatever you use Ubuntu, it will work there. I'm not sure about some other distributions, which are not Debian based if it works the same way

I don't know. You have to try it. But the first thing we are going to do is, of course, because we use a virtual box

we are going to choose devices, USB and connect the USB drive to our Linux

And we will see the volume there, but we will just see this encryption gibberish here

So the drive is basically useless at this date. So first things first

We need a tool called this locker to unlock the drive. So we are going to install it first

Click on your terminal or open your terminal window and type sudo apt-get update

tag y To make sure you are or you will be on the latest version

Then do sudo apt-get install dislocker. It's in the default software repository

I already installed it before. Clear the screen. Then sudo makedir forward slash media forward slash bitlocker

Then we are going to check out which hard disk or basically which drive letter our USB drive has

has that's what we can do with sudo fdisk tag l and now if you know how big your usb drive is you

can find it pretty quick mine is 16 gigabytes so it will be this one and we need the device

description which is sdb1 in here it can be different for you but this is the number or the

description that you need so remember that then we are going to do the next step which is actually

already unlock unlocking our drive so we do sudo dislocker i'm gonna unlock it in read only because

i just want to access my database but i don't want to write anything or i don't want anyone

else to write anything on my drive while it's plugged in the computer so i do tag r if you

don't want to have it read and you want to have it write also so read write then just leave the

tag R out and you should be able to write. Then we do tag V, devsdb1, which is our drive

Then tag U to get prompted for our password or if you want to you can type your password like this i just leave it to get prompted tec media bitlocker enter the password of your

disk encryption like your bitlocker password and then we have to drive unlocked and we see

another volume pop up here but we are not there yet now we need to mount our

drive which we are going to do with sudo mount tech again are if you want read

only which I do tech oh loop media bit locker this locker tech file media

forward slash mount I think we missed one step to create the directory

Let's quickly do that. sudo makedir media mount and then press the up arrow twice to run the command again

And look at this. There is our unlocked BitLocker encrypted drive and we can open our secret file or whatever

And you can see here that it's read only. So if you would have your database or any files there that you need access

you can read, but you cannot write. I'll prefer that because it's a bit more secure

And if you want to write on it, you know how to do it now with leaving the Tech R option out

So now every time you unplug your USB drive from your system again

of course, you would have to go through this procedure again, except creating the directories

so there is one thing what we can do we can create a little bash script which allows us to do this

with just running one command in the future so let's go ahead and open a terminal again

if the previous steps were enough for you and it's fine you want to go through the steps you can just

stop the video here but if you want to create the script which makes it much easier in the future

then stick around it's really quick to do so let's create the file first

sudo gedit user local bin and this is the directory or the path where all the scripts

lie or should lie that you can access them system wide because if you just put it in a different

folder you would always need to navigate to the folder first and then you would be able to run

If you put it in this folder, you will be able to run the script from everywhere on the system

You will see in a second. Let call it unlock Pseudo password again Oh I probably don have gedit sudo apt get gedit sudo apt get install gedit

sorry it's a bit late all right almost there I like gedit to edit config files so do again sudo

So gedit user local bin unlock.sh. And then I will paste this in the description below

So you can copy and paste it. This is my script. That's basically the same commands what we just entered before

And press ctrl s to save the file. Alright then we still need to make the file executable

so sudo chmod plus x user bin unlock dot s oh user local bin

unlock sh all right right so let's make a test i just rebooted the machine to get a fresh state

so you can see that we have the drive locked again and one more thing what you need to keep in mind is

the script we just copy and paste it make sure you adjust the volume label to your own because

then otherwise it will not work and also to plug in the usb drive if possible into the same slot

at all times because if it stops working it might be possible that the drive label changed

so that would prevent the script from working. Alright so let's run the script and we can run it just from the main directory, the root

directory or the home directory because we put it in the user local bin path so that

will be available system-wide. Then we need to enter the BitLocker password and

after a second our drive is here again and usable. So that means next time you

unplug it or you restart just hit up a terminal type sudo unlock sh and your

rifle be unlocked very quickly. You could also put a... you can create a

shortcut on your desktop or create a some other like a keyboard shortcut to

run this quicker but this should give you a good idea on how that works. So this

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