On my very first attempt to start my Dell Inspiron 1721 after having Staples Install System 7 Pro, (Worked OK with Vista Home Premium), I got a blue screen telling me I had turned on the Microsoft Bit Locker - I dont even know what this is and it occurred on my very first attempt at starting the machine under System 7.

Bitlocker is an encryption program that locks drives. It was available for local drives with Vista_SP1 (only for C: drive in Vista out of the box), and now, with Windows 7 Bit Locker is available for all local drives, and removable drives/devices as well. If someone at Staples used Bit Locker on the boot drive for your system, only that person who locked the drive will have the password to open it. I don't know what the effect would be if your boot drive is locked. Whether or not the OS would boot, I don't know. If it were not the boot drive, you would be prompted for a password to open it when you attempted to access the drive. Bit Locker will work fine on the boot drive if it is applied from within the same computer, once Windows is booted. If Staples created the drive image on another machine, then installed it into your machine, I don't think it would be accessible, as Bit Locker is aware of the system that locked the drive, and will not ask for a password on that same system, so it is transparent to the user. Sounds like you need to go back to Staples and find out what they did. Hope this helps. FW

Hi, I used to have windows xp on my laptop. Now I installed Windows7. It has 3 partitions namely C, D, E. After installing windows7, I could not open my E drive. It is asking me either password or recovery key. If I right click on drive it is showing used space "0" and free space "0". But if I used device manager, disc dive, properties, volumes and populating it showing used space as 50 GB and free spae 150 GB. First of all I do not know that if I locked this drive. Please help me on this. Thanks Sjasthi