Today I started Bitlocker (Windows 7 x64 bit OS) on an external drive but noticed something, the normal UI notification in the system tray that shows the progress indicator was missing. A bug? Perhaps.

When BitLocker starts it takes up the majority of the drive space to do the encryption, so to me it was clear the encryption was in progress but I couldn’t figure out how far along it was without the UI element.

Example: How I suspected encryption was still in progress (big red bar)

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To try and figure out what’s going on I reached out to my colleagues and was given a suggestion, “start the command prompt in administrator mode and run ‘manage-bde.exe –status’ command to see the status of encryption. Sure enough it provided me both the ‘conversion status’ and ‘percentage encrypted’ as shown below:

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So if you’re ever stuck not being sure if Bitlocker is encrypting or how far along it is simply run the command above for the answer. Hope this helps someone!