How to Password Protect USB Drive In Windows 8/7 Using BitLocker

It is very important to keep your USB flash drive or external hard drive safe if you have many valuable data in it. To protect your data from others you should have to set up a password for the flash drive. Windows lets you protect or lock your hard disk and removal drives by its Bit-locker feature.

The bit - locker is an encrypting tool, built-in with your Windows OS, which encrypt your whole drive and lock it by your given password. To access into the encrypted drive, one should provide the correct password. In this post I will show you how to set up password protected Drive.

1. Click on the Windows Start menu and type BitLocker in Search bar in windows 7 or in search box for windows 8 user. From that search result select the Manage BitLocker to open the bit locker window.

Alternatively you can go to Control Panel > System and Security > BitLocker Drive Encryption.

2. Now click on "turn on BitLocker" beside your selected drive. Then the BitLocker will start and will ask you how you want to unlock the drive.

3. Select "Use a password to unlock the drive" and type your password.

4. Then select a method to recover your password/key and press. Select one of the method and click next.

5. Select how much of your drive to encrypt. Choose according to your need and click next.

6. Now start the encryption.

It would take a few minutes, depending on the size and the format of your drive.