We have gone over the GPO settings for BitLocker recently and now we are going to cover the actual configuration of BitLocker on the computer itself.  There are two ways, the GUI way, or the CLI way.  Today we will focus on the CLI method. 

There is one command that allows you to manage BitLocker via the CLI and that is manage-bde.  Simply run this from an elevated command prompt and you will see the following output.

To determine the status of the volume simply run manage-bde -status

Before we go any further you will need to have preped the drive with the BitLocker Drive Prep tool.  The next step is to initialize TPM.  Again there is the GUI method that uses TPM.MSC or you can run the following command.

cscript manage-bde.wsf –tpm –takeownership -<password>

With everything ready you can run the following command to encrypt the drive.

cscript manage-bde.wsf –on –recoverypassword C:

Once complete you can run manage-bde -status again!