BitLocker locked my external harddrive by itself?!

I am speechless, so I came here and read all replies hoping for a fix, because yesterday happened to my colleague, after all of this comments Microsoft didn't even reply with a technical fix for their users!

I don't know what to say this BUG from 2014 to 2017 and no fix till today thats a shame

what "tomjordan1" said is 100% correct!!!

if you are going to post somthing similar like FaQ link don't try

Hi I am using a Window Surface and I just got my external drive locked by Bitlocker WITHOUT having enabled it. I need to access crucial data, how can I unlock it? If I double-click on external drive icon, a Bitlocker(D:) window pops up and if I click on "Load key from USB drive" then it says that "a valid USB key wasn't detected". The issue is that I NEVER set a key in the first place, I didn't even know what Bitlocker is!

I, too,  am facing the same issue. I manually backed up my files into my Seagate portable drive yesterday and worked fine. This morning, however, I was prompted to unlock my portable drive via a 48-digit recovery key subsequently after plugging it into my desktop. I am the admin of this machine and I did not enable bitlocker for any of my drives. I've also tried recovering my recovery key through "manage-bde -protectors -get K:" but none of which contained the 48-digit key.

Is there a solution yet?

I woke up this morning with the same problem as the original poster - BitLocker locked an external hard disk unbeknownst to me ... and of course I have no 48-digit recovery key or password because I didn't ask for it to do this - and am now freaking out. This thread, and Microsoft, have been ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS on solving this problem.

Here is what I've found out in my research in case it's helpful to others with the same problem. I should note that my laptop is a corporate issued laptop.

Why I think BitLocker Automatically Locked My External Hard Disk

My laptop's C drive is encrypted with BitLocker (but doesn't require this 48-digit recovery key). I turned Bitlocker off on my C drive to see if that would help. It decrypted the C drive but didn't unlock my external HD unfortunately. But I did find a clue: about an hour after turning BitLocker off, I noticed that the program "McAfee Management of Native Encryption" (MNE) automatically turned BitLocker on and started encrypting my C drive. I once again turned BitLocker off (via the Control Panel) but once again, McAfee MNE started it back up after a short time. I suspect this is what may have started the BitLocker encryption of my external HD without me initiating it. Maybe I kept the external HD plugged in too long and it got caught up in a McAfee MNE "I gotta encrypt everything" cycle?

So, I may have answered the "why BitLocker encrypted/locked my external HD" question, but I still have a worthless, locked HD that I can't access. On to that problem (after uninstalling McAfee MNE of course):

Unlocking my External HD - Getting my 48-digit Key

Here is what I tried but was worthless:

• My Microsoft account online, of course did not have my password

Here is what I tried, and was worthwhile in providing clues (and may be solve the problem for you), but didn't work for me:

• Using "manage-bde  -protectors -get d:" (where "d:" is your locked drive) as described in this thread from NCBrady's website.This command seems to give me info about the locked drive, but unfortunately it did gave me everything except the 48 character numerical password.

Here is what I still have to try:

• Contacting my corporate support group - I have an email in to them, but of course it's the 4th of July holiday so a response may not be imminent

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.