After I enabled Bitlocker for the system drive the restart takes hours - and now?

Question

In a Intel server from 2013 with Windows Server 2012 I installed a TPM Module last week. After that I enabled Bitlocker for one 2TB drive. It took many hours but at that time the rest of the server was running normal and was usable. I don't know how many hours it took because I left it running over night.

Yesterday I enabled Bitlocker on the C Drive. This is a RAID1 array with 1TB HDDs (not SSD). When I enabled it it showed a window that it is recommended to test this first. To do this I should click yes and restart the PC. I did this. It restarted right away and came up with an error but also the info that I should try it again. I know things like this happen with Windows from time to time so I clicked again to enable Bitlocker and it should test it and then I restarted the server. And that was about 16 hours ago and the server is still restarting. The blue four square Windows symbol is on the screen and the HDD light is flickering and continues flickering since many hours.

Does anybody of you have an idea if this is normal and how long this will take?

I don't want to press the off button to stop this only to discover that then the server maybe does not start anymore or maybe the waiting continues.

Any thoughts are appreciated. In theory people should work on that server again this morning and I like to solve this ASAP.

Answer 1

Short answer: It's not normal that this takes forever. The server should just restart without much delay

After waiting for more than 50 hours, still with the same Windows symbol on the screen and the HDD light flickering, I gave up.

Ctrl-Alt-Del did not work, so I pressed the on/off button. A short press to gracefully shut down did not work. So I pressed the off button for a few seconds and the server was off.

Then I switched it on again. It started just like normal with no error message. The Windows logon screen came up as normal, I logged in, and soon a message appeared in the bottom right that now drive C will be encrypted. This included a percentage of how much of the encryption was done.

All works fine now. But I guess I was lucky.

I leave this answer here so that other users will know that maybe the server just restarts and hangs forever. Hopefully this will not happen to too many people.