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How to Mount a BitLocker Drive on Linux at Login

By Seth Jensen
February 12, 2026

I recently reinstalled Linux on my desktop machine alongside Windows on a separate SSD. I also have a 3TB hard drive for backups and slower storage, which I formatted on Windows. I didn’t manually enable any encryption, but I got the following error when trying to mount it directly:

mount: /mnt/<mydrive>: unknown filesystem type 'BitLocker'

Looks encrypted to me! After some googling, I found a common solution is to use dislocker to decrypt the drive.

I was confused because my drive wasn’t encrypted, but the filesystem type was still “BitLocker”. My guess is that Windows encrypted the drive by default, though as you’ll see soon, it uses a “clear key,” meaning it’s technically encrypted but the key is stored unencrypted, meaning anyone can decrypt the drive. I suppose they want me to set up encryption somehow, but since this is a home computer, I don’t mind it being unencrypted for now.

If your drive is encrypted, there are a few extra steps. There’s an excellent guide on std.rocks¹ for this. I’ll also annotate the fstab-specific section so you know where to put the recovery key there.

Installing dislocker & FUSE

From this point on, all of the commands need to be run as superuser. Add sudo before the command or run them from the root user. And, of course, proceed with caution and read your man pages before blindly trusting me :D

You can find dislocker packages in the default repos for most distros, or build it from source. I’m running Ubuntu right now, so I just had to run:

apt-get install dislocker ntfs-3g

I was able to mount the filesystem as read-only with the default ntfs driver, but to write I had to install ntfs-3g.

Disabling Fast Startup in Windows

If Fast Startup is enabled in Windows, the drive can get corrupted or be forced into read-only mode in Linux. To prevent this, disable Fast Startup by entering the following in an administrator PowerShell:

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power\" -Name "HiberbootEnabled" -Value "0"

You can also disable it from the control panel — just search “Fast Startup”.

Mounting on login with fstab

It’s well and good to mount a drive one time, but since this is a persistent volume, I want it to be mounted consistently on boot. This is where fstab comes in.

To find a device, run lsblk, find the partition you’re looking for, and note the device name. You should see something like:

sda      8:0    0 232.9G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0     1G  0 part /boot/efi
└─sda2   8:2    0 231.8G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0   2.7T  0 disk 
├─sdb1   8:17   0    16M  0 part 
└─sdb2   8:18   0   2.7T  0 part 

In my case, I want to mount /dev/sdb2. First, though, we’ll need the device’s PARTUUID. Device names like /dev/sdb2 can change when you add or remove disks, so referencing a UUID is recommended in fstab’s man page to make sure you’re mounting the same disk every time. To get the PARTUUID, run the following:

blkid | sort

Here’s my output:

/dev/sda1: UUID="A1A1-A1A1" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="1a1a1a1a-1a1a-1a1a-1a1a-1a1a1a1a1a1a"
/dev/sda2: UUID="1a1a1a1a-1a1a-1a1a-1a1a-1a1a1a1a1a1a" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="1a1a1a1a-1a1a-1a1a-1a1a-1a1a1a1a1a1a"
/dev/sdb1: PARTLABEL="Microsoft reserved partition" PARTUUID="1a1a1a1a-1a1a-1a1a-1a1a-1a1a1a1a1a1a"
/dev/sdb2: TYPE="BitLocker" PARTLABEL="Basic data partition" PARTUUID="<mydrive-part-uuid>"

You should also be able to see the UUID after running lsblk -f, but for some reason, that command didn’t show me any disk information for /dev/sdb. It also didn’t show me the disk’s UUID, just the PARTUUID for each partition. That worked well enough for me, but please leave a comment if you know why that’s happening.

Open /etc/fstab in your favorite editor and add the following at the end:

/dev/disk/by-partuuid/<mydrive-part-uuid> /mnt/bitlocker  fuse.dislocker  nofail,clear-key                              0   0
/mnt/bitlocker/dislocker-file             /mnt/<mydrive>  ntfs            nofail,x-gvfs-show,x-gvfs-name=bitlocker-raw  0   0

I specified the clear-key option which is assumed in the dislocker command — the fuse.dislocker filesystem type takes dislocker’s long options. If your drive is encrypted, you’ll want to replace this with recovery-password=000000-000000-000000-000000-000000-000000-000000-000000 (recovery password is required if TPM is enabled) or user-password=123456 (a PIN code here works if TPM is disabled, according to std.rocks¹).

Now, I recommend trying to mount the drive before rebooting to avoid any startup issues if there are syntax errors or similar. After saving the file, run the following to get your fstab changes into systemd:

systemctl daemon-reload

Now you can mount the drive, then mount the dislocker-file just by naming the mount points:

mount /mnt/bitlocker
mount /mnt/mydrive

If you see files in /mnt/mydrive, hooray, it worked! Your drive should be mounted on reboot now. If not, there may be an error in your fstab file. I’d recommend trying the manual mounting method in the next section and noting at what step the failure happens.

Troubleshooting: manual mounting

I found it easier to diagnose and fix issues when I mounted manually first:

mkdir /mnt/bitlocker
dislocker -V /dev/sdb2 -- /mnt/bitlocker

If your drive is encrypted, dislocker should prompt you for a user or recovery password. Since mine isn’t, I instead used the default “clear key” stored on the volume. The guide on std.rocks¹ has more info for this.

If you check in the /mnt/bitlocker folder, you can see that there’s now a file called dislocker-file there. This file is what we mount:

mount -o loop -t ntfs /mnt/bitlocker/dislocker-file /mnt/<mydrive>

• -o loop says that dislocker-file is a normal file you’re mounting via the loop interface
• -t ntfs specifies that this drive is an NTFS filesystem, the default on modern Windows (post-1993, that is 😉)

After running this, you should see your files in /mnt/<mydrive>.

References

• https://github.com/Aorimn/dislocker
• man fstab

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