Windows 10: Laptop recovery with no admin password and encrypted bitlocker drive with no recoevery key.

A disgruntled former employee gave himself full admin rights on his work laptop (Dell Latitude), disabled other user accounts, and encrypted C Drive with BitLocker. No passwords or recovery keys are known. I am so far unable to do anything on laptop without admin password (every action is user account controlled). What is the best way to reformat hard drive for complete recovery and re-install of windows 10?


Thank you

B

:)

 

Unlocking Bitlocker encrypted system drive without recovery key

A few months ago I encrypted the whole hard drive on my Lenovo X1 Carbon 3rd Gen notebook. There are no partitions. I did not save the recovery key externally, if at all I saved it then it is on the encrypted drive itself.

Today my notebook crashed (whilst updating iTunes) and during restart I see the error message that Windows has a startup problem. It goes through the auto-repair procedure, which fails, and I'm taken to a screen which asks for my Bitlocker recovery key.
I don't have that so I try the various advanced options like system repair, but none of the options that do not wipe my data seem to work because they need access to the encrypted drive.

1. Is there any way to unlock the drive, given that I know my Bitlocker password but not my Bitlocker recovery key? I am not able to actually get to any screen which asks for the password, every screen is asking for the recovery key.

I tried the command prompt option and entered 'manage-bde -unlock c: -password' which prompts for the password. I enter the password but get the response 'The password you entered failed to unlock the drive'. I'm sure it's the right password. Next I try
to view the recovery key with 'manage-bde -protectors -get c: -type recoverykey' but the resulting data shows the key ID but not the actual numeric key value (it's just blank).

2. Can anything be done to unlock the drive via the command prompt, or any other route such as a boot disk?

3. Is it possible to generate the numeric recovery key elsewhere if the key ID and the password are known?

4. If I remove the hard drive from this laptop and attach it to another computer as a slave drive, is it possible to unlock it there using the Bitlocker password?

 

Unlocking Bitlocker encrypted system drive without recovery key

Thanks Shenan.

My main point is that I know my BitLocker password, but not my Bitlocker recovery key. I am frustrated as to why the BitLocker recovery key should be necessary if a user knows his BitLocker password. But the system is not offering me any option to enter
the password.

I'm aware that a clean installation is possible, but my only interest is in recovering the data on the encrypted drive so I don't want to do a clean installation.

I'll try a data recovery service and see what happens .

 

[BitLocker] Encrypting without generating recovery key?


Hi,

is there a way to encrypt a BitLocker drive without generating a recovery key?

Other encryption tools such as DiskCryptor/VeraCrypt/TrueCrypt or those found on Linux can simply be used with one PIN, no recovery key required.

BitLocker also allows to encrypt using a PIN. But, even when using a PIN, it still always seems to require to generate a recovery key in addition.

Is it possible to disable recovery keys altogether? So that only a PIN is set up to encrypt the drive and nothing else?

Why would you want a recovery key anyway, when you are already using a PIN? Why would you want to generate two passwords (PIN + recovery key) instead of just one password (only PIN without any recovery key)?