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I was trying to do a factory restore on my laptop and was getting a "Could Not Find the Recovery Environment" error. A Google search suggested I run reagentc/enable on the command line to fix this. When I did that I got this error:

REAGENTC.EXE: Windows RE cannot be enabled on a volume with BitLocker Drive Encryption enabled.

Not realizing I had BitLocker Drive Encryption enabled I tried to disable it. Only to discover that it's not enabled?:

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So some Windows programs think BitLocker Drive Encryption is enabled and some don't? I suppose that's neither here nor there - all I want to do is to just want reagentc/enable.

Any ideas?

neubert
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2 Answers2

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The message "Windows (C:) BitLocker waiting for activation" means that C: is indeed encrypted, but that the Full Volume Encryption Key (FVEK) that encrypted the data was saved to disk in plaintext.

If you want to remove BitLocker without activating it, use:

manage-bde c: -off

For more information see the post
Is a volume with BitLocker "Waiting for Activation" encrypted or not?

harrymc
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For anyone else who finds this- it is a really unhelpful error message because what I think it actually means is "I can't find a suitable partition to use for Windows recovery so I want to use your system partition but I can't because bitlocker is on"

In other words, the real problem is that there is something wrong with your recovery partition.

In my case it was that, although I'd tried to set the partition type to 27, I must have done it slightly wrong because it was actually 07. Setting it to 27 fixed the problem, reagentc /enable then worked.

Credit to "IT Army" on youtube where I found how to fix it.

Commands for me were

diskpart

sel disk 0

list part

sel part 3 (yours may be different)

det part (observe that Type is 07 not 27)

set id=27

det part (now correct)

exit

reagentc /enable

You can find a debug log for reagentc at C:\Windows\Logs\ReAgent

In my case the telltale lines were:

2024-04-28 21:09:40, Info [ReAgentc.exe] Checking partition at offset 511025610752, partition number: 3

2024-04-28 21:09:40, Info [ReAgentc.exe] skip MBR Partition which type is not MSFT_RECOVERY

Chris
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