Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

I’ve installed the Windows 7 RC in English. Worked perfectly, but most of our customers run their systems in German, so’ill have to stay up-to-date on how Microsoft’s translators “creatively” translated their work into German (actually, Microsoft’s translations aren’t the worst i’ve seen).

So today i decided the install the German language pack on my home PC and on my laptop – on the home PC, this worked as expected. On my laptop, which has it’s hard drive encrypted and protected by BitLocker in TPM mode.

After the obligatory reboot, i changed the system language. The machine rebooted and then asked for my Bitlocker recovery password – in German. It was obvious what happened: On German Vista machines with Bitlocker enabled, the Windows Boot Manager was still in English, but on Windows 7 the boot manager was also translated – which means that it now failed the integrity check because it was modified.

Luckily i could use our Terminal Services Gateway to log onto my administrative terminal server, where i had the BitLocker Recovery Password Viewer installed, so viewing my recovery key was quick and easy.

After booting into my now (mostly) German Windows 7, i temporarily halted Bitlocker protection, and immediately reenabled. This caused Windows 7 to reverify the state of the Boot Manager, and after i another reboot i was sure that everything was fine.

Oh, and this is one of the rather funny translation episodes: The window is not resizeable and the text doesn’t fit.