Vista Bitlocker and SP1

I felt it was important to clear up a misconception with Vista and Bitlocker. Most people are under the impression that Bitlocker in Vista RTM only allowed encryption of 1 partition and one of the new features of SP1 was the Bitlocker was going to allow encryption of multiple partitions.

This statement is not actually accurate....

Bitlocker in Vista RTM does support encryption of multiple volumes including removable drives (USB Hardisks but not flash drives). But the GUI only supports enabling BitLocker on the one drive. To encrypt multiple drives it has to be done from the command line using 'cscript c:\windows\system32\manage-bde.wsf' (BDE=Bitlocker Drive Encryption). What SP1 introduces is the ability to do this in the GUI. To use this command line tool you do need to run it within an Administrative command prompt.

With the cscript c:\windows\system32\manage-bde.wsf -on parameter you can encrypt any drive, specify keys and encryption level. This only works with Vista Enterprise and Ultimate.

Paul

Windows Vista SP1 goes to RC Preview

For those that have access to http://connect.microsoft.com/ and the Windows Longhorn/Server 2008 Beta program, Microsoft have just released Windows Vista SP1 RC Preview. I guess RC Preview is an intermediate step between Beta release and a full open Release Candidate. It has been release in all languages together which is quite surprising.

The SP preview contains 479 fixes of which 89 are currently available and the other 390 are not. So there are an extensive number of fixes which are not currently available for Vista users. 27 areas of Vista have been fixed, everything from the base operating system, the Desktop shell through to services like application compatibility and Unix migration services.

Another signification entry in the Release Notes is that the group policy management console if installed will be removed and cannot be installed. There will be a new version in the future to replace the current GPMC that can be downloaded, but no timescales on this.

Paul