I have a 3TB hard drive that I wiped and created a new NTFS partition the full size of the drive and then chose to do a Bitlocker full drive encryption of the more or less empty drive.
I any case after hours of encryption, it got stuck at 99.9%. I found this answer: Full drive encryption with Bitlocker freezes at 99.9%
This seemed to help, however, my question is then, what happens to the space that you expanded the partition into?
Why can’t I just create a 1GB partition, encrypt that, which would only take a few seconds, then expand that 1GB volume to full size of the drive? How can it still be encrypted?