How To—Decrypt Linux BitLocker (2024)

To encrypt data media or hard disks under Windows, one usually uses the standard program Bitlocker. If you now want to decrypt BitLocker hard disks under Linux, or more precisely this data carrier, is this also possible? Provided, of course, that you also know the password.

For the installation, you only need the program dislocker. This can be installed even with a Linux live installation. For this, you need, of course, a Linux terminal.

sudo apt install dislocker

If you now want to find out which encryption method was used with BitLocker, you require the command dislocker-metadata followed by the parameter V.

Depending on the name of the hard disk, the device file (dev/sdb2) can differ here. The type can now be displayed via the pipe and the “grep” command.

dislocker-metadata -V /dev/sdb2 | grep Type

To decrypt the hard disk in Linux BitLocker and mount it in the Linux system, it makes sense to create a separate mount point. The easiest way to do this is to create a new folder in any directory.

By default, Linux operating systems always like to use the “mnt” directory. As command now dislocker-fuse is needed.

mkdir /mnt/bitlocker-hdd
dislocker-fuse -V /dev/sdb2 -u /mnt/bitlocker-hdd

After entering the password, however, you do not get direct access to the contents of the hard disk. Only a file is displayed. This file is called dislocker-file.

Only now the “mount” command is needed to mount this hard disk into the file system. It is best to create a subdirectory in which you mount the NTFS formatted hard disk.

mkdir /mnt/bitlocker-hdd/windows-hdd
mount -o ro /mnt/bitlocker-hdd/dislocker-file /mnt/bitlocker-hdd/windows/hdd

Much more information about the Linux tool dislocker for mounting BitLocker encrypted disks under Linux can also be found on github.