Your Active Directory Domain Services Schema Isn’t Configured To Run Bitlocker Drive Encryption

In our past, we’ve seen different cases when you can’t encrypt your operating system drive with BitLocker. Now in this article, we’re back with yet another issue that you may see while enabling BitLocker. In this case, clients connected their machine to domain receives following message when they try to encrypt the OS drive:

Your Active Directory Domain Services schema isn’t configured to run Bitlocker Drive Encryption. Contact your system administrator.

No matter if you reboot the machine, the error continues to stay in and thus clients can’t encrypt the drive. This means they can’t take benefit of BitLocker feature. From the error message itself and practical past cases, this issue is limited to clients connected to domain. On standalone machines not part of any domain, the issue is not present. So how to resolve this problem? Well, there is a simple solution to this and it is described below.

Your Active Directory Domain Services Schema Isn’t Configured To Run Bitlocker Drive Encryption

As the error relates to Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) schema, we should first know what it is. According to Microsoft, “Active Directory schema contains formal definitions of every object class that can be created in an Active Directory forest. The schema also contains formal definitions of every attribute that can exist in an Active Directory object.” So if this schema isn’t configured for your domain, your system admin can surely help you. However, before you contact your administrator, have a try to below mentioned simple trick. It has worked for clients with similar issue.

After doing a long research, it has been found that this problem occurs when a client is logged on to a local account on domain-joined system. So if you’re logged in to a local account and try enabling BitLocker, you may certainly face this issue.

To prevent this problem, simply log out of your local account. Then on login screen, select and input the details for your domain account and log in to it. Then try to enable BitLocker and the issue will no longer be present.

Hope this helps!