How to Unlock BitLocker Drive on Mac — The 2023 Guide
BitLocker is a robust encryption technology available freely on Windows OS. This is a great feature to protect your data in both internal and external drives. That being said, you won’t need to worry about data leaks once the external hard drive or USB flash drive is encrypted by BitLocker. The encrypted drive is only accessible when the pre-set password is granted. Hence, many users like me are quite determined to encrypt an external drive with BitLocker when there are important files or data inside it.
[Updates on 2023]: The following tricks are working fine on latest Apple M2 Mac with macOS Sonoma, Ventura and Monterey!
However, I ran into an issue when I was trying to unlock a BitLocker drive on my new MacBook Pro. The drive is just not readable. You will receive a warning message when connecting a BitLocker encrypted external hard drive or USB to Mac:
Initialize: This opens Disk Utility app, where you can format the drive and remove BitLocker encryption. After that, the drive is not encrypted and can be accessed as a normal external drive on Mac.
Ignore: This will close the error message and asks the computer to ignore the drive. Hence you can not read or write to this drive. Also, the drive is not shown in Finder.
Eject: Disconnect the drive from Mac.
For sure, we don’t want to erase this drive, right? Simply, we cannot afford the data loss! The problem is that BitLocker is an encryption technology developed by Microsoft and can be only available on Windows OS. macOS does not support as Apple refused to make such changes in macOS Kernel. Fortunately, there are several third-party apps you can use to unlock a BitLocker drive on Mac. In our example, we will take UUByte BitLocker Geeker app for example.
Notice: The steps are different for Intel-based and M1 powered Macs. We will share two different approaches for both processors.
How to Unlock BitLocker Drive on Mac for Intel Processor
First, download BitLocker Geeker installation file (.pkg) from the following link:
Double click the file to start the installation process. Once it is done, open System Preferences and click Privacy tab under Security & Privacy, where you should grant Full Disk Access permission to BitLocker Geeker app. This allows the app accessing all drives connected to this Mac.
From now, attach the BitLocker drive to your Mac and choose ‘Ignore’ when a small window pops up.
Open BitLocker Geeker app and you will see Bitlocker drive showing up on the main screen with a lock sign at the left.
Double click the drive name and input the BitLocker password at input field. Now, click the Mount button to unlock BitLocker drive on your Mac.
Wait about 20 seconds and you will see all content in your BitLocker drive. And the drive is now named UNTITLED.
This is a complete process for opening a BitLocker drive on Mac. Currently, it works on Catalina, Mojave and High Sierra. Unfortunately, there is no free software for this purpose. We will also introduce other premium apps at the end of this post in case BitLocker is not working as expected on your Mac.
[Updates for macOS Big Sur]
We found out the routine for macOS Big Sur was a bit different from previous macOS releases. According to our research, Apple has changed the security policy in Big Sur. We have to make some addition configurations to let BitLocker Geeker works smoothly on macOS Big Sur. The additional work is mainly involved during installation process. The rest of steps are the same once the installation settings is completed as follows:
Step 1: After BitLocker Geeker app is installed on your Mac, it says “System Extension Blocked”. You should click Open System Preferences to proceed.
Step 2: Please click Allow button to let “Benjamin Fleischer” system software running on Big Sur. It is blocked by default as this software is not downloaded from Mac App Store.
Step 3: A restart is required before this new system extension to be used in future. Please do as it asks to reboot the Mac.
After reboot, enable Full Disk Access to BitLocker Geeker app as we shared in above section. And follow the rest of steps to unlock BitLocker drive on Mac.
How to Unlock BitLocker Drive on Mac for Apple M1 Processor
Apple released a few Macs powered by its own chip, called M1. Those Apple Silicon is based ARM platform largely adopted for mobile devices. Hence, the security policy is much different when comparing to previous Intel chips. In addition, all M1 Macs are currently running macOS Big Sur.
From our testing, the major differences are among the post-installation process of BitLocker Geeker.
First, you have to shut down the Mac instead of restart in order to enable a new system extension on M1 Mac.
Secondly, you should make changes in Startup Security Utility. To open this system app, your Mac should boot in Recovery Environment by pressing Power button for more than one minutes. After that, you should enable Allow user management of kernel extensions from identified developers under Reduced Security. The default option is Full Security.
Once the above settings are done, then you are able to allow Benjamin Fleischer system software from loading.
Finally, restart the Mac again to take all changes into effect. Now, you can use BitLocker Geeker app to unlock BitLocker drive on Mac.
If you are confused about in this part, please refer to the official online tutorial instead.
Alternative Tools for Unlocking BitLocker Drive on Mac
Windows Virtual Machine: It is common to see a Windows virtual machine running on your Mac as we cannot live without Windows in a live world. If you have done so, then you can open this encrypted BitLocker drive in Windows virtual machine and access the drive for reading and writing.
iSumsoft BitLocker Reader for Mac: This is another premium software for reading BitLocker drive on Mac. It supports external hard drive, USB drive and SD card. However, the success rate is a bit slower and have issues when running on latest Big Sur.
iBoySoft BitLocker for Mac: This is one-stop solution for managing BitLocker drive on Mac. And the price is much higher with no surprise. It is able to read or write BitLocker drive and it is also capable of encrypting a drive with BitLocker on Mac. It is quite nice BitLocker Reader software on Mac if you have enough budget.
Find Another PC: It is recommended to remove BitLocker encryption from the drive if you are using it frequently on Mac. You can turn off BitLocker on another PC. After that, it is free to read from or write to the drive as you like. This will also increase the speed of file reading and writing.
