A funny thing happenned on the way to truly secure portable computing...
A couple of months ago I made the decision to use the new Windows Vista BitLocker feature. For those of you who don't know, BitLocker is a new feature in Windows Vista (Enterprise and Ultimate editions) that allows you to encrypt your volume rather than original files. It is the best way to ensure that your data will not be compromised, even if your computer is.
In order to use BitLocker your computer needs to have a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip that would make BitLocker an easy install. In the absence of this chip you can use a USB thumb drive which should work nearly as well.
Well my laptop is a little over a year old and does not have a TPM chip so I decided to go the USB way, but every time I tried Vista told me that my hard drive partition configuration was not compatible with BitLocker, despite all indicators pointing to it being right. I tried all sorts of tricks, including converting my Basic Disk into a Dynamic Disk (DO NOT DO THIS!). Eventually I gave up and figured I would get around to it.
The other night I was at the Calgary IT Professional Community's 3-2-1-Launch Event and met a gentleman who had BitLocker working without the TPM chip. I asked him how and he told me that Microsoft released a patch the previous day that allowed it to work.
The next day I downloaded the patch and got much further than I ever had with any previous attempt... until I saw the dreaded words 'BitLocker is not compatible with Dynamic Disks.'
This was not a good thing, since the conversion from Basic to Dynamic is basically a one-way street. There are ways around this (the most promising of which I found on www.TheLazyAdmin.com) but none of them work with Windows Vista. I was stuck.
I had a choice: forget about BitLocker, or reformat my computer.
Fortunately backing up and restoring your system in Vista is a snap, and I am currently working on restoring my system... onto a BASIC Disk!