Dislocker, a tool to access partitions encrypted by Bitlocker desde Linux

unlocker

Microsoft's encryption technology for Windows Bitlocker, is great technology which, when used in a partition can protect the information on it. But one of the big problems it has is that it only allows access to information from Windows, leaving aside the possible use of the partition on systems other than Windows.

It is because of that to be able to decrypt and mount BitLocker volumes desde Linux We will use a tool called “Dislocker” which will allow us to read BitLocker encrypted partitions on Linux and macOS. Dislocker has read / write support for BitLocker encrypted partitions in Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7 and Vista (AES-CBC, AES-XTS, 128 or 256 bits, with or without the Elephant diffuser). It also supports BitLocker-To-Go encrypted partitions (USB / FAT32 partitions).

Dislocker installation on Linux

As such the tool is not pre-installed in any distribution from Linux, but if it is within the repositories of most distributions Linux. So if installation is quite simple.

In distributions like Debian, Ubuntu or any other distribution based on these, installation dThe tool can be done from the terminal by typing the following command in it:

sudo apt install dislocker

In the case of those who are Arch Linux, Manjaro, Arco Linux or any other user distribution based on Arch Linux, installation is done from the AUR repository. Therefore, they must have the repository enabled in their pacman.conf file and an AUR wizard installed.

The installation is carried out with the command:

yay -S dislocker

Now for those who are users of Fedora, RHEL, CentOS or any other derivative of these, in a terminal they only have to type the following command:

sudo dnf install dislocker

Configure Dislocker

Now that Dislocker is installed, we need to configure it. To start, we must create a new mounting folder where the Bitlocker partition can be accessed when the decryption process is complete.

sudo mkdir -p /media/contenido

After creating the "content" folder in the media directory, another folder must be created. 

sudo mkdir -p /media/bitlocker/

Once both folders are in the media directory, you can check if the folders are where they are supposed to be either by moving to the directory with CD or from your file manager.

Now it is time to use Dislocker to decrypt and mount Bitlocker partition desde Linux.

To do this, the first thing we must do is run the lsblk command to find the Windows partition label which is encrypted with Bitlocker.

lsblk

That in my case it will be / dev / sdb1, but in any case it may differ, that is why it is important to identify the partition.

Already identified, now we will use dislocker, decrypt the partition. To do this we are going to type the following command placing the partition label and also placing the path of the folder that we created with the name of "bitlocker" previously.

sudo dislocker -V /dev/sdb1 -u -- /media/bitlocker

Here We will be asked for the password used to access the Windows user. We type it and press enter.

Using the dislocker command, now it's time to mount the Bitlocker partition in the / media / content folder.

sudo mount -o loop /media/bitlocker/dislocker-file /media/contenido

It is important to take into account that Dislocker will automatically mount your partition in "read-only" mode and that to solve the problem, just run a chkdsk on the unit.

With this we can access the content of the partition encrypted with Bitlocker desde Linux and be able to work with the files within it.

Finally to unmount the Bitlocker partition on Linux, just run the umount command about the folder. It is important to mention that any document or file with which I know this partition must be closed.

To unmount the partition just type:

sudo umount /media/contenido

In case the partition is not dismounted, we can force the dismount by typing the following command:

sudo umount /media/contenido -f


3 comments, leave yours

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  1.   juan manuel said

    thank you very much for the information

    I want to tell you that I have reached the option that requests the user's password, but I get an error
    error, can't find a valid and matching vmk datum. abort.

    none of the provided decryption mean is decrypting the keys. abort

    can you help me, thank you

  2.   Rafaelin said

    Thank you very much for the manual, it has been very useful to me !!

    I have a pendrive with Bitlocker and I have been able to configure it in Linux following your steps but I cannot put it to modify it. It mounts it to me "read only" and I am not able to modify it. Might you help me? Thanks!!

  3.   jse said

    It works fine for me on Linux Mint and Ubuntu, but when I want to use it on Debian, which is the distro I want to use, it doesn't recognize the password. You need some other dependency.