Windows 10: Windows behaving weirdly and TPM chip malfunctioning

Hi all,This afternoon when I turned on my computer and logged on, I opened my start menu and only Windows UWP apps showed up in the start menu the pre-installed apps on windows. Also, all my app tiles were gone and the start menu was really thin. Then, all of a sudden, all my apps that I've installed all appeared and they stated that they were all new. Then, OneDrive told me to sign in again, so I did that. My Microsoft Teams also asked me to sign in again and then told me "Something went wrong. Your computer's Trusted Platform Module has malfunctioned. If this error persists, contact your s

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TPM chip locked out

Something went wrong with a TPM chip on one of our laptops.

The laptop asked for the Bitlocker recovery key (which it accepted) but didn't let us into the Azure connected Windows account with the PIN we created.

We logged in under the Local Admin account and turned Bitlocker off.

Now the TPM chip is locked. We can't enable it from tpm.msc as it says;





It's been like this for 24 hours now.

I've clear the TPM chip in the BIOS

I've also flashed the BIOS

I've reset Windows using the 'Recovery' console in the settings.

I even tried enabling Bitlocker without a TPM chip from gpedit.msc and we're getting the same error message.

What can we do? How do we clear the TPM chip since we are the owners?

 

Verify Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Chip on Windows PC


Something I came across not long ago, is Firmware-based Trusted Platform Modules (fTPM). Whereas before in order to take advantage of a TPM you needed to have a physical TPM chip soldered to the motherboard, that seems to have changed at some point. You can now have either a Discrete TPM (Physical chip) or Firmware-based TPM.

As per THIS article, fTPM is acknowledged by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) as a perfectly valid form of TPM and seems to perform much the same functions as a physical TPM. For Intel, their fTPM is called Intel Platform Trust Technology (PTT). I don't know what chips/motherboards/BIOS support PTT, however due to it being Firmware based (as the name suggests) and not requiring a separate physical chip, it means for some devices it's possible to retrospectively add a TPM to devices that didn't have one before.

Looking through the Intel NUC list, it's not just 6th gen Skylake NUC's that it's supported on, but also 5th gen Broadwell NUC's and 4th gen Haswell NUC's too. So if you have a NUC and you have the latest BIOS, then the chances are you have a TPM 2.0 module even if you didn't think you did. You just need to enable 'Intel Platform Trust Technology' in BIOS. As previously mentioned, I don't know what other manufacturers support/will support fTPM too.


The Intel Platform Trust Technology (PTT) setting in Intel VisualBIOS:





With Intel PTT on in BIOS, Device Manager and tpm.msc show a TPM 2.0 module installed.

 

Bitlocker on my newer model laptop with TPM chip

I am sorry but the link that you provided was of no use. My bitlocker is apparently working as it should on this Samsung S9 laptop which has a TPM chip, but no TPM module. I took it to a computer shop to discover that the module is missing. We also turned
off bitlocker and the laptop decrypted in about 20 minutes. That is fast considering that there is 80GB+ data on its SSD hard drive.

I am no happy that my laptop boots up directly to the Windows password screen. I need it to boot up the the bitlocker password screen first.

Do I possibly need to change the settings on my TPM chip equipped (but not TPM module equipped) laptop as I did on my desktop PCs that do not have TPM chips? On those I changed the settings to authenticate without TPM.

Please help me figure out how to make my laptop boot to the bitlocker password screen before proceeding to the Windows password screen.