Create BitLocker Drive Encryption Shortcut in Windows 10

If you are using BitLocker, you might find it useful to create a special shortcut to open the Drive Encryption window directly with one click. From there, you will be able to suspend the drive's protection, change how your drive is unlocked at startup, back up your recovery key, or turn off BitLocker completely for one or more installed drives.

BitLocker was first introduced in Windows Vista and still exists in Windows 10. It was implemented exclusively for Windows and has no official support in alternative operating systems. BitLocker can utilize your PC's Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to store its encryption key secrets. In modern versions of Windows such as Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, BitLocker supports hardware-accelerated encryption if certain requirements are met (the drive has to support it, Secure Boot must be on and many other requirements). Without hardware encryption, BitLocker switches to software-based encryption so there is a dip in your drive's performance.

To create a BitLocker Drive Encryption shortcut in Windows 10, do the following.

Right click the empty space on your Desktop. Select New - Shortcut in the context menu (see the screenshot).

In the shortcut target box, type or copy-paste the following:

explorer.exe shell:::{D9EF8727-CAC2-4e60-809E-86F80A666C91}

The command is a special ActiveX shell command. You can get the list of such commands here:

CLSID (GUID) shell location list in Windows 10

Use the line "BitLocker Drive Encryption" without quotes as the name of the shortcut. Actually, you can use any name you want.

Click on the Finish button when done.

Now, right click the shortcut you created and select Properties.

On the Shortcut tab, you can specify a new icon if you wish. You can use the icon from the %windir%\System32\fvecpl.dll file.

Click OK to apply the icon, then click OK to close the shortcut properties dialog window.

Now, you can move this shortcut to any convenient location, pin it to taskbar or to Start, add to All apps or add to Quick Launch (see how to enable Quick Launch). You can also assign a global hotkey to your shortcut.