BitLocker locked my external harddrive by itself?!

Anonymous
2014-10-11T23:49:51+00:00

Hi,

Today I connected my external harddrive to my PC and it popped-up this message saying the drive is locked by bitlocker.

This has never happend before on the same PC.

I had no clue wat bitlocker was, so I looked it up and I start to believe that I will never be able to acces my drive again because:

I have no recovery key or password because I have never been in contact with bitlocker in my life untill now.

I searched on every drive inside and outside my PC for it and my microsoft account tells me I have 0 keys stored. 

So, what can I do? This disk contains data I need, so formatting is not an option.

***Post moved by the moderator to the appropriate forum category.***

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Devices and drivers

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-08-10T11:03:04+00:00

    Sorry! If You have to use shitwear, like Microsoft programs, **** happens. Until now there are no anwers to this problem and there are growing number of us. No not trust one external drive system and do not trust microsoft!

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-08-09T22:37:34+00:00

    I was locked out last night and I did not even know bitlocker existed. I closed my surface 3 for a few hours and then attempted to open it back up. Locked out. NO recovery key. I have important files that I cannot recover. 

    Can anyone else provide guidance on this?

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-03-16T05:21:41+00:00

    This issue is really a scandal and as usual Microsoft is not doing anything. Can someone post the link to their topic on technet if any ?

    On this forum it is usually useless support as the agents are just able to redirect to the help page and do not understand our problems.

    The issue happened to me an western digital usb 3.0 hdd, on Windows 10 HOME (yes the edition WITHOUT bitlocker nor bitlocker to go features, so how the **** did bitlocker locked the drive ?)

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-03-11T06:24:19+00:00

    After my external hard drive was surprisingly locked by bitlocker, which I newer have used, I went to store , and bought two external hard drives more. Until now they have worked. The first one, where is my storage of many years, is and remains unusable.

    In one of the first answers, there is an interesting thing: BitLocker Drive Encryption will lock an encrypted drive and require recovery in these situations:

    BitLocker has detected a possible security risk during startup.

    That in an interesting answer! I have newer, ever used bitlocker –newer heard there is one. If it works so, that when it recognizes possible “security risk”, it locks the hard drive, is this legal –even in USA? The bug is, that it locks also the drives, which are not encrypted!

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  5. Anonymous
    2016-03-11T02:09:18+00:00

    Read through this forum after having the same problem today. My drive get locked by itself after connecting to windows 7. I can't find any solution though from this forum. Has anyone found the solution to this problem? I totally can't accept having to format the drive and lost all the data.

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