No Keyboard/Mouse - IFL x64, MS Surface Laptop 3

[flintdk]

Afternoon,

Been a year or two since I used Terabyte, apologies if I'm rusty . I went to take an image of a laptop today using first IFL_CUI_x64 and then IFL_GUI_x64 (latest versions of both, downloaded today). I have no keyboard or mouse when booted (to either) from a USB key. The laptop is an ms surface laptop 3, so has a trackpad instead of a normal mouse. Am normally happy to navigate around using the keyboard, but with no keyboard either I'm stuck. They keyboard does work on initial boot (when selecting the screen resolution) but once IFL is booted it does not. Any suggestions?

Also - a tiny bit off the posted topic: I was reading here about drives with bitlocker (https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=616), something I've not backed up using terabyte before. The laptop has one bitlocker encrypted partition (C:) and one non-bitlocker-encrypted partition (D:) on a single 512GB SSD drive.

In the IFL section it mentions "accessing" bitlocker drives. But is it ok to backup a bitlocker partition to a non-bitlocker partiition using IFL? Does the terabyte software care at all if one of my selected source partitions has bitlocker? Or is it just a bit-for-bit backup so works fine, ableit with no access to the partition content with tools like tbimount, tbiview etc.?? As long as the target partition or drive is not encrypted of course.

Thanks!

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

Not sure on the mouse and keyboard issue. Have you tried a USB mouse or keyboard to see if those are found? Otherwise, if you have IFW maybe TBWinRE would work better.

> In the IFL section it mentions "accessing" bitlocker drives. But
> is it ok to backup a bitlocker partition to a non-bitlocker partiition
> using IFL?

Yes. This is the recommended procedure since backing up to a BitLocker partition may cause corruption.

> Does the terabyte software care at all if one of my selected
> source partitions has bitlocker? Or is it just a bit-for-bit backup so
> works fine, ableit with no access to the partition content with tools like
> tbimount, tbiview etc.?? As long as the target partition or drive is not
> encrypted of course.

It would be a normal backup of the entire partition. You could save the backup image to the D: drive or a USB drive (both not encrypted). Note that the backup image may be very large (the size of the partition, for example) and take a long time. Also, as you say, it wouldn't be able to be accessed by TBIView, TBIMount, etc.

[flintdk]

Hi there,

Thanks for the reply - it's much appreciated.

-> It's great to know I can backup the bitlocker encrypted partition to a plain/unencrypted drive. I love to have the security (that Terabyte has always offered) of having a backup of my machine, freshly configured, out of the box. I'll perform that backup in the next day or two and then do a test restore, I was wary of doing that without confirmation.

-> On the keyboard/mouse I've only a single USB port on the surface laptop, which I used for booting it to IFL. Is it OK to yank the USB key once IFL has finished booting (i.e. is IFL operating entirely from memory at that point)?

-> I don't have IFW. I've been used to using IFD and IFL, I never made the jump to IFW. Am perfectly happy with the non gui versions. I guess maybe it's time for that!?

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

Make sure you have your BitLocker recovery keys somewhere safe in case you need them (and you very likely will). I would also recommend having a backup in the unencrypted state as they are much easier to work with (if there are any issues with the encrypted backup it may end up useless). I assume, in your case, that you would be backing up the entire drive (all partitions) except for D: if that was going to be the destination for the image.

It's okay to remove the IFL UFD after booting has finished. The only time you wouldn't want to do that is if you configured it with MakeDisk to leave the boot drive mounted (in that case you would generally unmount it prior to removing). A USB hub could also be used.