Image capture taking much longer than usual and creating a very large image

Products

• Ghost Solution Suite
• Deployment Solution

Issue/Introduction

Capturing an image of new machines is taking much longer than expected and the image is much larger than it should be.

Environment

All versions of Ghost Solution Suite and Deployment Solution

Cause

HP and other OEM manufacturers ship their machines with Bitlocker enabled but "waiting for activation"

Resolution

HP and other OEM manufacturers ship their machines with Bitlocker enabled but "waiting for activation". The drive is encrypted but waiting for a key to be set (activated).

Boot the new machine to Windows, go to "Manage Bitlocker" in control panel. In Manage Bitlocker you should see a message that Bitlocker is enabled but waiting for activation. To unencrypt the drive click "enable Bitlocker" set a key (saved off box), then click "disable Bitlocker" and wait for the drive to completely decrypt before booting to WinPE/Automation.

To verify that bitlocker is disabled run command with elevated privilege's: manage-bde -status

The output  should have something like:

    Size:                 471.56 GB
    BitLocker Version:    None
    Conversion Status:    Fully Decrypted
    Percentage Encrypted: 0.0%
    Encryption Method:    None
    Protection Status:    Protection Off
    Lock Status:          Unlocked
    Identification Field: None
    Key Protectors:       None Found