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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.***
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.
When the f*** will microsoft aknowledge this issue ??? All the posters here would lie or have forgotten that they turned on bitlocker ? That can't be a coincidence ! FFS, is it that complicated to at least admit that microsoft support can be wrong and start doing your troubleshouting job ?
When the f*** will microsoft aknowledge this issue ??? All the posters here would lie or have forgotten that they turned on bitlocker ? That can't be a coincidence ! FFS, is it that complicated to at least admit that microsoft support can be wrong and
start doing your troubleshouting job ?
Jokers man. So, (although this doesn't help that much) after much research, I just said forget it and formatted my thumb drive. It's useable again but it wiped all of my data. Luckily I had an external with all the data I wanted so it basically just made my drive useable again. Hope that helps. Format the disc if you don't care about what was on there and want to use the drive again.
Hi,
Thank you for posting in Microsoft Communities.
As I understand that you are unable to access your external hard disc and you get a message stating “The drive is locked by bit locker”.
BitLocker Drive Encryption will lock an encrypted drive and require recovery in these situations:
- BitLocker has detected a possible security risk during startup.
- BitLocker startup key or PIN is lost, or the startup key is damaged.
Note 1: if a drive is locked using Bit Locker there is no way you can unlock it without the key. if you
don’t have the key you cannot access the Drive. The key or the Recovery drive is the only way to access your drive back.
Note 2: Bit Locker will not be enabled automatically.
Regain access to a computer locked by BitLocker Drive Encryption:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/bitlocker-drive-encryption
Thank you for contacting Microsoft Communities.
You are mistaken Vinz. Two of my usb thumb drives have been locked randomly by bit locker. I've never locked anything and never even heard of bitlocker. I definitely didn't lock them on my own and now I can't unlock them. What's the fix for this?
I agree with ElanHurtado, Bitlocker randomly locked the edxternal drive! this is scandalous! There is no fix and Microsoft doesn't care at all.
When the f*** will microsoft aknowledge this issue ??? All the posters here would lie or have forgotten that they turned on bitlocker ? That can't be a coincidence ! FFS, is it that complicated to at least admit that microsoft support can be wrong and start doing your troubleshouting job ?
I am in touch with a lawyer and I am thinking of starting a class action against microsoft. Is anyone interested in joining?
I had valuable data on my drive, I lost data I collected for my thesis and I didn't have time to backup on another device. Microsoft can't ignore this issue!
This exact same problem happened to me today, but I was thankfully able to resolve it and wanted to share in case it is helpful to others.
I was using my external hard drive this morning and everything was fine. This afternoon, all of a sudden, it was locked, and was requesting that I enter a 48-digit recovery key, even though I had never set up encryption or even heard of Bitlocker before, similar to the other posters above.
After almost having a meltdown, as I have years of research and articles saved in there, I did a google search for "microsoft support unlocking bitlocker." That took me to a page on support.microsoft.com that gave me different options, including "find my bitlocker recovery key". Then, from there, I logged into my microsoft.com account, at which point it asked me to verify my account by retrieving a code sent to my email account. After that, it took me to a page listing my devices and corresponding recovery keys. Each recovery key had a "key ID" next to it. I looked for the one that matched the "key ID" that was listed in the prompt to enter the recovery key. I pasted that recovery key into the box. I had to do it several times before it worked, but it indeed unlocked my external hard drive. (I noticed that at least one time the paste function did not paste all 48 numbers so I manually checked to make sure all 48 were there and then it worked.)
I note that, even after unlocking it, the external hard drive locked itself again a few minutes later. I was able to unlock it by entering the same key again. I'm not sure how to stop the drive from locking by itself in the future, so will make regular back-ups of the contents of my external hard drive.
