How to Password Protect USB Drive in windows 7

Windows 7 | BitLocker

It is very important to keep your USB drive or external hard drive safe if you have lots of valuable data in it. To protect your data from others you should have to set up a password for the flash drive. Windows 7 lets you protect or lock your hard disk and removal drives by its Bit-locker feature.

The bit - locker is an encrypting tool, built-in with your Windows 7 OS. It can encrypt your whole drive and lock it by your given password. To access into the encrypted drive, one should provide the correct password.
This tutorial will describe the steps how to use the BitLocker and setting up a password to USB free. By this procedure you can also protect your external hard disk or internal hard disk drives.

Protect USB drive by BitLocker:

To find out the Windows Bit-Locker easily, type "bit locker" in the start menu search box. Or, you can go to Control Panel > System and Security > BitLocker Drive Encryption.

Control Panel > System and Security > BitLocker Drive Encryption

Click on the "Manage BitLocker" and the window will show you to "turn on BitLocker" to the specific drive.

Now click on "turn on BitLocker" beside your selected drive. Then the BitLocker will start and will ask you how you want to unlock the drive.

Choose how you want to unlock the drive

Select "Use a password to unlock the drive" and type your password. Then select a method to recover your password/key and press Next to start the encryption.

Encrypting

It would take a few minutes, depending on the size and the format of your drive.

You are done! From now any user of Windows 7/Vista/XP must provide the password to open your USB drive.