Formatting a drive that is protected with BitLocker

Question

I am planning to do a complete format on my computer. My HDD (which everything is located) is encrypted with BitLocker. A few months ago I tried to manually decrypt the drive to not cause any error before format but it literally took ages to even decrypt. Since I don't care about the data, is it OK for me to format a Bitlocker encrypted drive? Will it cause any problems or errors?

Solution 1

If you are not worried about date, simply format it. Bitlocker does not stop you from doing so. It won't cause any problems or errors.

Solution 2

There's nothing at all wrong with formatting a BitLocker-protected drive. Doing so removes BitLocker - in a sense, when you encrypt the disk you are "Formatting it with BitLocker" because BitLocker takes over the space where filesystem metadata usually goes and moves it elsewhere - and it will be as if you'd just formatted any other disk.

You will of course lose all data, even if you don't do a full format - and I recommend only doing a quick format because, as @MichaelKjorling pointed out, a full one takes approximately "ages" - because it will no longer be possible to decrypt the disk's old data. I'm guessing you're fine with that, though.

Comments

[Admin]

How are you reinstalling windows? Are you going to be using a recovery partition or discs?

[Admin]

Modern rotational drives tend to have a throughput in the 50-100 MB/s range during purely sequential I/O. (Seeking can easily drop this to a few hundred kilobytes per second in the worst case, if you are IOPS-bound doing I/O on single sectors.) Thus a 4 TB drive will take at least 80,000 seconds (or thereabouts), which is a shade over 22 hours, to process. Is this in line with your relatively vague "ages"?

[Admin]

@MichaelKjörling yes it is.