Win7 Bitlocker drive encryption leading Drive format in XP

I have two hard disks-500GB and 80GB,so installed win 7 on 500GB HDD and 80GB was kept as slave.And i locked a drive present in 80GB using Bitlocker.Since week when i use win 7 ,after 20 min the display screen turned to black screen.So installed XP on 80GB drive.Now when i try to open the drive which i locked using Bitlocker is asking for format,that drive has important information.How can i retrieve the data from that drive

Did you install XP over the encrypted 80 Gb disk ???



~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you have successfully encrypted a drive with the bitlocker, then later you can unlock it using either password or recovery file:

How To Use BitLocker on Drives without TPM - the How-To Geek


~~~~~~~~~~~~


I recommend True Crypt, which creates encrypted virtual drives that you can mount and access only after you enter your key. Noone can use these encrypted virtual drives without your password. It uses a more convenient on-the-fly encryption method.

TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X and Linux

Very stable and reliable.

Thanks for reply..

I have installed XP over the encrypted 80 Gb disk and now only XP is booting.When i connected 500Gb HDD removing 80Gb ,there is a boot error.Then I tried to disable encrpytion using win7 OS disc,after entering recovery key,a message appeared that temporary access to drive is possible but system is booting XP only.Then tried to install win7 on another drive of 500GB but installatiion cancelled with a error.

Now i planned to get a fresh copy of win7 and install to disable encrpytion and retrieve data.Should i use the same OS disc to uncrpyt the data??Can i recover the data in XP after formating the encrpyted drive??

If you installed XP over the encrypted drive, then there is no way to unencrypt it back.


~~~~~~~~


Cannot be sure you want to go this way, but I would :



(Skip 3-4 if you don't need XP)

1. Back up your most important personal data to a USB-stick or DVD-RW

2. Connect your HDDs to a stripe raid, if supported by your motherboard

3. Boot from XP installation CD and create and format partitions

4. Install XP

5. Then install 7 to a different partition

6. Use EasyBCD or iReboot to switch between the systems

Download iReboot 1.1.1 - NeoSmart Technologies
Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies

7. Use bitlocker to encrypt non-system drives where you store personal data