How To Lock Your Windows PC Hard Drive Without Any Software

A computer is used mostly to store important data and perform other tasks as well, all the data stored in a computer are in the hard drive (a disk drive used to read from and write to a hard disk) which is one of the most important aspect of the computer. The hard drive should definitely be protected, especially when your computer is being shared among friends and relatives.

There are a number of third party software which can be used to lock or hide your important folders and files, a software like the “folder lock” is good at that but if you happen to forget or lose the password you’ve thrown away all the locked or hidden data; that’s one of the major disadvantages of these folder/file protection software.

Now, to safely protect your hard drive and avoid the risks associated with third party software, Microsoft has introduced an awesome feature to enable you lock the hard drive of your windows PC. The new feature is called “BitLocker” and it has been enabled on windows 7 and windows 8. Using BitLocker, i successfully locked and secured the hard drive of my windows 8 PC and by the end of this post you’ll also be able to do that.

How BitLocker Works
BitLocker is already built-in in windows 7 and 8 computers. What is does is to encrypt your hard drive and automatically do the same to every file you save.

How To Lock Your Windows PC Hard Drive Without Any Software
To lock your hard drive using the BitLocker feature is as easy as moving the cursor, follow the below steps –

Right click on the hard drive you wish to lock and click on “Turn on BitLocker”

A new window will pop up, select “Use a password to unlock the drive” then input a (strong) password and click on “Next”
Another window will surface providing you with three options as shown on the image below. Select the second which is “Save the recovery key to a file”, then click on “Next”. You can as well choose to save your recovery key to a USB flash drive or print it in case you forget your password.

Now you’ve saved your recovery key, click on “Start encrypting”, this may take time depending on the amount of files in your hard drive
Once the encryption is complete, your hard drive will be locked and will require a password before it can be accessed.
That’s the easiest and safest way to protect your windows PC hard drive with no third party software involved. Try this out and share your experience in comments below.