BitLocker locked my external harddrive by itself?!

This has happened to me twice with Windows 10 Pro. One was abrand new Dell Vostro which was supplied by Dell with Bitlocker on.

However it should always ask before encrypting any new drive connected. It did not. It also should attempt to give you a key whenever it first applies bitlocker. It did not do this either.

I was able to unscramble this one by plugging it in to the offending Dell, turning off bitlocker and waiting a long time for it to finish the process. 

If you are on the correct PC (the one that locked it) surely there should be an easy to find option to turn bitlocker off for an external drive. I couldn't find it and the owner neither wanted or knew that the main drive had been encrypted so just removed the encryption from everything.

The second drive that has been encrypted also happened without warning and I have been unable to track down the offending PC so have now lost the contents of the drive.

This totally unacceptable. External drives and flash drives are regularly used to move data around so Bitlocking them without prompting can never be acceptable.

This needs fixing immediately.

It's 2017 and this problem is still not solved?

2 external hard drives totally inaccessible sitting here with my Dell laptop.

How could it bitlocker my drives without even asking me?

All my 10+ years data gone in a flash?

Is this reality we have to accept?  

Somebody, please help.

Hi,

Kindly check out this support article from Microsoft: BitLocker Recovery Keys.

Also, you might want to refer to this thread from the Community and see what Ramesh.Kumar have shared to resolve the issue.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

Interesting! I have now found my first Bitlocker security code. I will try it, whwn I have my useless external hard drive in my hands. I still think this all sucks. I have not used Bitlocker and I still have to learn and try several things to correct Microsoft’ s wrong doings. This is NOT customer care!

16.2.2017

Martti

Like many other users experienced, my external HDD was also locked by Bitlocker without my knowledge. I didn't even know what Bitlocker was, and even now, I can't find Bitlocker application in my Dell XPS (Windows 10 Home).

The story is, I just had my Dell being repaired at Dell Repairing Center and they had to reinstall the Windows. After I got back my Dell, I tried to plug the external HDD and there was a notification saying that my external HDD was locked by Bitlocker and I have to input the 48-digit recovery key to unlock the drive. How would I know that when I never protect my external HDD using password or anything? I could access the external HDD in this Dell laptop just before I sent it to the repairing center. I tried to read the linked articles, and they're not helpful. It's not that I forgot or lost the recovery key, I didn't even got one and didn't even know that some strange feature made it locked.