Unable to use device encryption in windows 10 home

[tbarbone]

Hi Everyone,

I recently bought a hp 15-ec0001ca from best buy. I wanted to encrypt the hard drive, but the system does not allow me to. It says in system information panel that there is a "unallowed dma capable bus/device detected". From some of the googling I have done it seems that this can potentially be fixed by playing around with the registry, which I am not particularly good at. From what I gather there is a device in this HP notebook that is not on a whitelist for windows as far as DMA devices. I could be wrong here. Is this something that would be updated in a windows update at some point in the future? Or will I just not get to use this feature unless I modify the registry? Any help would be great, thank you.

[WAWood]

@tbarbone 

Strictly speaking, you're not going to be able to encrypt the entire hard drive.  Why? Because at a minimum, the boot loader files must be on a partition that is NOT encrypted in order to boot the PC.

What you CAN do is encrypt the OS partition -- but personally, I would advise against that, as that leads to problems down the road.

If what you want to do is protect certain files and data, a safer, but still effective way, to do that is to create a folder on the drive to hold that stuff and use third-party products to encrypt that folder.  That gives you the same level of protection and it doesn't risk corrupting Windows in the process.

[tbarbone]

Thank you for getting back to me and helping me out so quickly.

My understanding is that the device encryption in windows 10 home uses a stripped down version of bitlocker. Would that still lead to stability problems in the future? I mainly want this for piece of mind that if my laptop went missing the drive would be encrypted and the thief would have to reinstall the OS to get things working. I just want to make sure that in that case my data would have to wiped.

[WAWood]

@tbarbone 

OK, thanks for the feedback -- and yes, you should be able to use Bitlocker to encrypt Windows on your PC. But, it has to be Win10 Pro, not Win10 Home -- and lots of consumer-grade laptops come only with Home.

I generally advise AGAINST it, as you would have no idea how many people contact us weekly asking for how to BYPASS their Bitlocker encryption -- because they wouldn't spend two minutes to write down their key!

Since I don't use it (by personal policy) I can't provide you any instructions -- but there's plenty of stuff online about HOW to use it.

Good Luck