How to remove BitLocker encryption and install Linux on a locked laptop

Installing Linux on a restored HP Pavilion with BIOS issues and an encrypted drive.

Recently, a friend gave me a recent model of a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion laptop. He said, “It turns on but goes off almost immediately. Maybe you could use it?” I gladly accepted the gift and took it home, and it performed as he described. I noticed CMOS battery errors from the BIOS and decided to take the computer apart.

An inspection revealed no separate CMOS battery, and subsequent internet searches revealed that this unit didn’t have a separate CMOS battery but instead relied on the main battery. The battery would not hold a charge and I decided to purchase a new one from an online retailer.

It took a couple of days for the new battery to arrive, and when it did, I removed the cover again and removed the old battery, installed the new one, replaced the cover, and started the laptop with a USB drive with Fedora 41 KDE Plasma. Pressing the ‘escape’ key on the keyboard got me to the BIOS menu, and I chose F9 to boot from USB.

The unit has a six core AMD Ryzen 5 with 8 GB RAM, AMD Radeon graphics, and a 497 GB NVME drive. I started the Fedora installation process but was halted with an error message that stated:

Error occurred while activating your storage configuration – device is active.

I restarted the machine and tried again. It’s the same error message.

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Internet searches of Fedora forums made me realize that the NVME drive was encrypted with Bitlocker and would not allow me to continue the installation until I could ‘decrypt’ the drive. What was I going to do? I tried to remove the encryption with GParted, Parted, and lost the ability to rebuild the drive with the Windows 11 restore partition.

I briefly considered purchasing a replacement NVME drive for the unit. Further internet searches led me to consider using ShredOS. After researching several options, I devised an approach that suggested using the ‘dd‘ command. I used ‘lsblk‘, which lists block devices and solid state drives on a Linux system.

I booted the laptop with a live USB drive, opened a terminal, and issued the following command:

$ sudo dd if=/dev/uvrandom of=/dev/nvme0nX

Be sure to replace ‘X’ with the appropriate drive designation on your system. The process took 7021 seconds to complete, which is approximately two hours. When it was done, the decrypted partition was gone. I used the Fedora 41 KDE-Plasma live drive and installed it without difficulty.

I learned a lot from this experience and am grateful for all the excellent resources and tools available for Linux distributions.

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This article is adapted from “There is always a tool” by Don Watkins, and is republished with permission from the author.