Need help with bitlocker (No bitlocker key)

[kentos]

Hey everyone,

A friend of mine has an old laptop from his previous company, and apparently it had bitlocker installed on it. He booted up the laptop today, to find that his computer has been locked by bitlocker. Unfortunately when he logs into his Microsoft account, it doesn’t have a key he can use. He said he tried going into recovery mode, and tried the reinstall with “save my files” but the laptop says “can’t do it”. Any ideas on how he can get access to his laptop, without having to wipe the drive and reinstall windows?

Thanks!

[Rod-IT]

If he doesn’t have the key, or recovery information, there is no way to get past bitlocker. If there was it wouldn’t be very effective at protecting people’s data.

[Internet_Schneider]

Tried this? Where to Get BitLocker Recovery Key if I Forgot

[peterw2300]

MS give the possible bitlocker key locations: Finding your BitLocker recovery key in Windows - Microsoft Support

The old laptop came from his previous company and they may be able to help. If he had any important personal data on the laptop then it should have been backed up as a hardware failure of the laptop could destroy the data on it. Since, I presume that he is repurposing the laptop for his own use, then it will be best to wipe it and reinstall and I hope he has the BIOS password.

[matt7863 (m@ttshaw)]

How is it booting to recovery mode if the drive is encrypted with bitlocker?

[blake-murphy]

In a previous job we used to get old machines from banks & financial institutions that were often setup with Bitlocker. For fun we would always see if we could get into them. The setup on most of those machines would let us gain access to personal photos, possibly documents but the key business info would never be accessible.
Hirens was our most successful, but as our task was to destroy the drives it did not matter if we damaged them in our efforts.

Sounds like you are trying to recover full use not just a few pics… Good luck

[jarmbrister]

@kentos

Any ideas on how he can [circumvent BitLocker and] get access to his laptop, without having to wipe the drive and reinstall windows?

In a word, “no.”

[aldobaney]

I was asked to “sort” a laptop for my bro in law, he acquired the laptop, it was pretty useless as it was bitlocker encrypted with no key etc to access it.
So I had 2 tasks……
First task, get the laptop working for him, I struggled with bitlocker and i was being hounded for the laptop back. Quick solution, replace the hdd (actually fitted an ssd), install windows 10, office etc and give him it back. All done but I was intrigued by this hdd that I refused to just bin as it is always handy to have a spare (especially an ssd).
Second task, get the original hdd out of its bitlocker jail. I tried all the cmd and windows type suggestions i could find but none of them worked. I found another suggestion that seemed a bit far fetched but thought, why not try it.
I put the hdd into a laptop and booted it using a usb win 10 set up disk, walked through the set up and it offered partitions to install to. I deleted all partitions (the bigger ones), created one partition, formatted it and the hdd now has windows on it. A handy spare that i can erase/format etc and put to use as needed.
The down side is that whatever was on the disk is lost but there was nothing on it we needed.
Good luck with yours but always back up or synchronise your data to another drive.

[Rod-IT]

Wiping the disk is always an option, but recovery of an encrypted disk with no key or recovery files is not possible.