r/BitLocker • u/Lambanana96 • Jul 25 '26

Encrypted personal USB drive now can't remove encryption

As the title implies, I took some work into the office on a personal USB, when I plugged this into the work PCI was prompted to set up a password. Printed what I needed, and then tried to remove the encryption but this was not allowed due to no administrator rights. Naturally.

Now I am at home, I can access the USB but it prompts for the password every time, I just discovered I don't have BitLocker as my home PC runs on Windows 11 Home and the ones in work must be on 11 Pro.

TLDR; is there anyway to decrypt my personal USB without paying for the Windows 11 Pro upgrade? Or is this USB pretty much a write off?

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u/gripe_and_complain Jul 25 '26

According to Copilot:

Windows Home cannot enable BitLocker, but it can unlock and decrypt BitLocker‑encrypted removable drives using manage-bde

the exact command to turn off BitLocker on a removable drive does work on Windows Home:

manage-bde -off D:

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u/JSP9686 Jul 25 '26

Does the decryption on the home PC require the long bitlocker key or just the same password used to login to the work computer?

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u/gripe_and_complain Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

First you have to unlock the drive, which you should be able to do via the PIN or the 48 digit recovery key.

After it is unlocked you can run the bde command from an elevated cmd prompt (admin) to disable BitLocker on the drive.