BitLocker – A TPM was not found error message

The last two days I have talked about setting up your hard drive for BitLocker encryption and turning on BitLocker in Windows Vista in my series on BitLocker Drive Encryption. However, in order to use BitLocker, you have to partition your hard drive correctly and have a compatible Trusted Platform Module (TPM) BIOS.

In the first of this series I showed you how to partition your drives and in the second post I showed you how to turn on BitLocker if you have a TPM. But if you do not have a TPM, you will see the following error message on the BitLocker screen:

A TPM was not found. A TPM is required to turn on BitLocker. If your computer has a TPM, then contact the computer manufacturer for BitLocker-compatible BIOS.

But if you don’t have a TPM, you can still use BitLocker, but you’ll have to change a setting in Group Policy. So here’s how to enable BitLocker without TPM:

Step 1: Open Group Policy editor by going to Start, then Run and typing in gpedit.msc.

Step 2: Now navigate to the following policy setting in the Group Policy editor:

Local Computer Policy – Computer Configuration – Administrative Templates – Windows Components – BitLocker Drive Encryption

Step 3: Now in the right-hand pane, go ahead and double-click on the following setting:

Control Panel Setup: Enable advanced startup options

Step 4: Now click the Enable radio button and make sure that the option Allow BitLocker without a compatible TPM is checked. Click OK when you are done and close the Group Policy editor.

Step 5: Go to the command prompt and type in the following command: gpupdate /force. This will refresh all the policies on the computer immediately.

Finally, go ahead and open the Control Panel and go to BitLocker Drive Encryption and hopefully the exclamation point requiring a TPM will be gone. Now you can turn on BitLocker like I described in the previous article. Enjoy!