Tag Archives: configmgr

Enabling BitLocker fails with “BitLocker Setup could not find a target system drive. You may need to manually prepare your drive for BitLocker”

Windows_7_Logo

My workplace has finally decided to start encrypting their mobile devices with BitLocker. After number of laptops completed successfully (and without any major issues) today we have hit problems when BitLocker wizard would fail with the following message:

“BitLocker Setup could not find a target system drive. You may need to manually prepare your drive for BitLocker”

Enabling_BitLocker_fails_with_BitLocker_Setup_could_not_find_a_target_system_drive_You_may_need_to_manually_prepare_your_drive_for_BitLocker_1

So far only one machine was affected but there could easily be others. Solution to this issue was not immediately obvious but its essentially due to Windows (or BitLocker wizard) not being able to shrink the drive to create the system partition that’s required for BitLocker (there was only one partition). Trying to manually shrink the drive using Disk Management would not work too as “Size of available shrink space in MB:” was equaling to 0:

Enabling_BitLocker_fails_with_BitLocker_Setup_could_not_find_a_target_system_drive_You_may_need_to_manually_prepare_your_drive_for_BitLocker_2

Now this number was showing 44MB before I ran Windows Defrag tool but now is 0MB meaning you cannot shrink the drive at all (not even by 1MB!) In Windows Explorer, internal hard drive was showing 120GB in size with roughly 60GB free so there was plenty of free disk space available in order to re-size the partitions.

Two quick fixes that were applied to finally resolve this are as follows:

  • Since the problematic machine was a laptop (Dell Latitude E6230) hibernation was turned off (powercfg -h off in command line)
  • System Restore points were also deleted (cleanmgr is the command, then More Options tab, System Restore and Shadow Copies and Clean up)
  • After this I re-run BitLocker drive encryption wizard and all was happy again!

    Side note – trying to manually prep the drive using bdehdcfg i.e. bdehdcfg -target c: shrink -size 300 -quiet -restart was not working too.

    SCCM 2007 R3 – Remove All Packages from DP (Distribution Point)

    SCCM_Logo

    Lets assume that you have to decommission a distribution point that’s part of your ConfigMgr 2007 R3 infrastructure. Doing it the clean way would mean manually removing all packages, you have ever copied, which is definitely not fun. Initial copy of packages, when the DP is first setup, has a nice feature called “Copy Packages” but there is absolutely nothing allowing you to remove them. Pretty stupid really as trying to find every single package and manually “Manage Distribution Point” can take literally hours… Fortunately there is very handy tool to help us out here called “ConfigMgr 2007 Distribution Point Package Utility” created by Cory Becht.

    This utility queries the primary site server for all of its distribution points including child sites and then displays the packages for each distribution point. You check or uncheck which ones you want on that distribution point. You can also copy the packages list from one DP to another.

    This utility was done in Visual Studio 2005, so it does require .NET Framework 2.0
    Version History:

    1.3 – Now includes duplicating the packages of another distribution point.
    1.2 – Updated to include new ConfigMgr 2007 classes for packages (SoftwareUpdate, BootImage, etc.)
    1.1 – Fixed multiple DP’s per site error.
    1.01 – Included “Select All” button for packages.

    Continue reading