I'm experimenting with setting up our company laptops with Win7 and BitLocker. There's no TPM available so I'm using the USB startup key option. In my testing I put the encryption key on a MemoryStick flash card and it's working fine.
To test test the system, I copied the encryption key to a USB flash drive and BitLocker doesn't see it there. I tried copying the files to an SD flash card and that worked, so I'm thinking that BitLocker must be remembering the drive to find the key and not just searching all available drives. Is that correct?
Is there any way to change where BitLocker looks for the key?
Also, am I correct in thinking that there's no reason I can't keep numerous startup keys on a single flash disk? I'd like to have a sort of "Master" key that works on any laptop for easier maintainence and as a backup (we're not currently using Active Directory).
To answer my own question, using the "Manage Bitlocker" option in the control panel allowed me to create a duplicate key onto a USB flash drive and it now allows me to boot from the USB port (the MemoryStick still works as well). I'm not sure exactly what it changed in the boot process, but it worked.