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I have a client who turned on his home computer and it boots to a screen asking for the bitlocker key. We never turned on bitlocker. I don’t have the key (it was never saved or uploaded to his Microsoft account) and I don’t have the password. Is there any way to get around this? If I reinstall windows, would I be able to get the data with a data recovery software or would it be encrypted? I have zero experience with encryption. I have looked at numerous articles and videos. Nothing I have found works.

I did reach out to DriveSavers. They say they can get the data back but for their economy recovery it is a minimum of $700.00 and may be as much as $3000.00

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

3 Spice ups
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It would be bad for security if you could.

It’s going to be encrypted.

No mention of the OS here.

Windows 11 24H2 enabled bitlocker by default, codes are either saved to the Microsoft account that is used to login or prompted to be saved during setup.

If the Device is a Dell device with any version of Windows 11 and logged in to an MS account, this used to also be enabled by default.

The only ways I know that circumvent bitlocker are vulnerabilities.

No backup of their data, they wasn’t asked to save a code?

5 Spice ups
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@kswizard IF the data is valuable to them DriveSavers is your best option. If not and they have the data in a cloud based storage like OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox then you can reinstall and get the data from those providers. But it doesn’t look like they do. Does this client have a Microsoft account? if so, you can get the Bitlocker recovery key from their Office account.

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If you don’t have access to the encryption recovery key, DriveSavers won’t be able to do anything for you (assuming they don’t have some exploit to BitLocker that Microsoft hasn’t plugged yet). All they can do is potentially recover the still-encrypted data from a damaged drive and give you a copy of it - you’d still need the encyption key to read it.