Trashed MBR and active partition after trying Win 10 BitLocker with Atmel TPM

[wsalomon]

My apologies in advance for the length of this...

Several days ago, I thought I had lost a Harddrive that was in a 2nd-drive Ultrabay. This got me thinking about drive encryption should this have happened for real. Fortunately I found the drive, and backed-up all the new incremental files.

First - it's a T-61, with Win 10 x-64 that I've put a SSD into, reserving the old HDD for archiving and restoring disk images (made with Acronis True Image 2015). The HDD "lives" in a "generic" Ultrabay caddy. The old drive still has its original partitioning in 3, a Active System C: (Windows 10), and back-up D: and E: partitions. The SSD is partitioned identically.

So I read through some material material on BitLocker, understanding the the Atmel TPM is accessed from the BIOS Security area. I checked the Win 10 Device Manager, and saw no sign of the Atmel TPM chip.

So I set the TPM to "Active", and not knowing if this had ever been used before, I cleared the contents. From there I rebooted, and now saw the Atmel in Device Manager. From there I went to BitLocker and looked at the set-up. What I saw were all 6 disk partitions (3 from the SSD, 3 from the HDD), all with BitLocker off. I'm not sure precisely what I did next - I think it was to set the TPM ready to be used, but I never set any of the partitions to BitLocker On. I may have turned the TPM off in Control Panel, then Rebooted, and set the Atmel TPM to disabled in the BIOS.

What I ended up with was catastrophic mess. The SSD was fine. The HDD wasn't. I found I couldn't open Office files as I lacked permission to do so. My Quicken files couldn't be opened either. However, if I copied the files, they would open, albeit with error messages that Word couldn't find its Temp files.

So, to make things simpler, I took the SSD out and put the HDD back in. (The DVD drive went back in the Ultrabay for a Win 10 install disk or the Acronis recovery disk.)

So I tried...
1. making sure the Environment variable %USERPROFILE% was correct, using a dump of all Environmental Variable using a command line Set command.
2. rebuilt the MBR and the BCD file after getting boots that gave me the choice of "Windows 10" (the "real" active partition), and a "Windows 10 Pro" option that gave a reboot.
3. looking at DISKPART which looked okay (but no partition listed as Active, just Primary)
4. making sure the the C: drive was "Active" (I could be mistaken, but at one point the 500 MB hidden partition may have been Active, and I changed it back to C: drive to be active.


Finally I gave up, and just re-imaged the C: partition.

So all this brought up the following questions:
1. Should one ever try doing BitLocker when two disks with active Windows partitions exist on each?
2. What happens when one take a Bit-Locked drive from one TPM activated T-61 to another one (either TPM-activated or not)? I assume that each TPM T-61 is encoded differently.
3. Why did the SSD survive all this without problems, but the HDD did not?
4. Is this something peculiar to T-61s and the Atmel TPM chip, or does this happen on any older BIOS-type machine vs UEFI?

Any suggests on a "read" for this would be greatly appreciated!

[TuuS]

There is an IBM manual that comes with brand new NOS T61 boards that covers what needs to be done when changing boards so you can avoid these problems. By moving the drives from one laptop to another you are infact changing boards so this may answer your questions. The booklet is pretty thick but mostly redundant info in twenty some languages, but if you want to figure this out I might be able to get you one, or I've sold dozens of these new NOS boards and maybe one of the members would be nice enough to scan the relevant pages for you... I would, but am not currently able, but could give it to you cheap or perhaps loan it to you, as I think I have a spare I can part with.