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
    2015-05-24T16:02:06+00:00

    Thanks Mohammed, for your reply, but it doesn't help me very much.  No point you referring me to the Microsoft help on Bitlocker, (I have read it), this is a BUG.  It is not due to me doing anything wrong.  Bitlocker locked my drive without me requesting it.  (Contrary to your assertion that Bitlocker only locks drives when requested).

    I will post on the Tech forum as you suggest, but with no great hope of solution.  This needs to be reported to the relevant operating system support team, and it should be solved by Microsoft, who should get back to me with their solution.  

    One final point.  If I try to do a Dir on the drive in the command prompt it says:

    "The bitlocker metadata for the encrypted drive is not valid", further indicating that some sort of system error has occurred.  A question.  Since the drive can still be viewed on the 8.1 machine, if I reformat it from that machine, will it then remove the corrupted bitlocker metadata?

    Thank you

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-05-26T16:25:16+00:00

    I have the SAME issue ... 3 of my drives were encrypted by Bitlocker last night by the SYSTEM user (I've got the event log to prove it). 

    At 3:31AM everyone in my house was asleep, I certainly didn't initiate this in any way, shape, or form ... so PLEASE tell me how I can recover this information as I have lost access to 3 drives that I NEED for my business.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-05-26T17:57:19+00:00

    I keep getting e-mails from this thread :P Seems like I'm not the only one having this issue.... I hope a solutions comes up, because I still haven't been able to get onto my hard drive :(

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-06-01T04:33:25+00:00

    Hi,

    Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Community.

    As I have mentioned in my previous post this issue is better suited in TechNet forum we have a dedicated team with advanced tools and permissions, and members on the TechNet forums will be a better position to help out with this issue. So please post you query on TechNet forum.

    https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/home?category=w8itpro

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-06-02T17:54:17+00:00

    I have the exact same problem, waiting for a solution...

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