I have an old portable WD Elements hard drive bought years ago and is encrypted by BitLocker on a Windows 10 PC. It is mainly used for backing up media files and import data. Recently, I bought a new MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon M4. Unfortunately, the drive is not accessible when this external hard drive is connected to my Mac.
I can see the drive in the Disk Utility app and unable to see any data from this encrypted drive. Is there any way to let me read bitlocker drive on Mac?
You need to choose the Ignore option and install additional system extension/app to access and read bitlocker drive on a Mac. In addition, you also need the correct password to unlock the bitlocker drive on Mac.
Macs don’t natively support BitLocker-encrypted drives since BitLocker is a Windows feature. If you’re trying to open a BitLocker drive on macOS. You can set up a Windows virtual machine on your Mac (using Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, or VirtualBox) and read the BitLocker drive on Mac from Windows.
This solution can help you unlock and access BitLocker-encrypted data on any Mac. Make sure there are enough free space to create a Windows virtual machine, at least 60GB. In addition, it also takes time to create a VM on Mac.
Running a VM consumes significant system resources (CPU, RAM, disk space) since both the host OS (macOS) and guest OS (the one running in the VM) need resources. This can slow down a Mac, especially if it has limited hardware specifications.
In addition, setting up a VM can be complex and requires a good understanding of both the host and guest operating systems. Managing snapshots, shared folders, and networking configurations can also introduce complexity.
In fact, there are many BitLocker reader apps available in order to open BitLocker drive on Mac. This is much more easier than creating a Windows virtual machine.
Thanks for the suggestion, jebusx. The SysGeeker BitLocker Reader app works great for this purpose. Now, I can easily read and write bitlocker encrypted drive on my MacBook Pro M3.
Macs don’t support BItLocker, which is a Windows-specific encryption; if you only have a Mac and need to read an encrypted BItLocker drive, you may have to resort to third-party software or a virtual machine.
If you have encountered the situation that you need to access some files from a BitLocker encrypted external hard drive, but when you access the external hard drive on your Mac, it shows that you can’t read the encrypted hard drive or some warning messages like “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.” Common solutions are to use a BitLocker reader for Mac, install a Windows Virtual Machine, or decrypt the disk in a Windows PC.
