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After three years of owning a Dell Inspiron 13 (Windows Home) the computer somehow enabled Bitlocker on its own and encrypted my C: drive. Since I did not activate Bitlocker, I don't have the keys to decrypt the drive. My Microsoft account does not list any keys in it so there is no way to recover the keys as far as I know. Therefore none of the published solutions I have seen can work because they all assume that I have access to the keys. I see many similar complaints online (at least since 2018) and hundreds of "likes" so this appears to be a relatively common problem.
When booting, I see a message titled "BitLocker recovery" and it asks for the recovery key. It then says to "try your work or school account at: aka.ms/aadrecoverykey."
This suggests that the key may be associated with some active directory domain away from my computer. However, the admin account on this computer has, to my knowledge, never logged into an active directory domain, although non-admin users have. And, if the Amin account has connected to a Active Directory somewhere, I sure as heck did not give them a permission to encrypt my drive and lock me out of my computer, and give the key to some third party "work or school" account. If this is what happened, Microsoft, you have a serious security issue where third parties can effectively encrypt hard drives without permission using Microsoft's own tools. That is ransomware - without the ransom. But, this is still just a theory vaguely supported by this link https://hardsoft-support.kayako.com/article/99-windows-10-bitlocker-turns-on-without-a-notice
Here is a quote from the post: "Dell and Lenovo systems that ship with the Windows 10 operating system and are equipped with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) capability will have Microsoft BitLocker encryption enabled from the factory. It has been found that once the device is registered to a Active Directory domain - Office 365 Azure AD, Windows 10 automatically encrypts the system drive. You find this once you reboot your computer and are then prompted for the BitLocker key."
Since I don't know what possible organization could have encrypted the drive, and since I don't have admin access to them, the instructions in the article don't apply.
The laptop is Dell Inspiron 13 7370 - which I don't even think has a TPM chip built in it. BIOS is version 1.20.0. ePSA build is 4306.13 UEFI ROM.
So, Microsoft, how does this get fixed?
P.S. My other computers have Win10 Pro and and they have Bitlocker turned on, but this computer intentionally did not have Bitlocker turned on - and it was not supposed to be possible to turn on bitlocker on a Win10 Home edition. I am mentioning this to highlight that I did not "accidentally" trigger the Bitlocker being turned on - especially because it requires many steps and confirmations. The drive was simply encrypted one day with permission from me.
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.
No longer a true statement. Bitlocker did, in fact, activate itself and encrypted drives without owner consent or action. There are likely thousands of people this morning who can no longer access anything on their computers. I know for a fact because my Mother and Father in law have a couple of boat anchors sitting in their den with the Dell label on them. Google Windows KB5012170 update causing BitLocker recovery screens, boot issues.
Hello ,
I work for a big company authorised repair shop for a spesific brand.
So i see a lot of notebook where the Windows OC has came with the unit , after some updates on the windows the bitlocker activates .So i want to ask Microsoft what shoud we tell the client when he comes and tell us the problem is bitlocker and he doesn't have a key in the MC account.We cure the problem only with instaling a fresh new windows.
I replied once before with the fix that I was able to come up with., but I'm not seeing it in this thread. If your computer is a personal computer and not part of a a corporate network, you are usually requested to give a user name and a password to Microsoft when you activate. In my case, My Mother in Law and Father in Law both have personal computers only. When they activated, they used their standard email account as the user name. Neither could remember the password they used and the PWs they have written down did not work. I had to set up there email on another computer and use the forgot my password option on the microsoft account login. I had to have access to their phones as well, because there is two factor ID. Once the password was recovered, I was able to login to their respective Microsoft Accounts and recover the bitlocker recovery key.
While it is true that a clean install would have restored the computers, there would be no way to recover the pictures, documents and other stuff they had stored on those machines. There were some backups that I had done and I had taught them how to run backups, but their practice of backing up was spotty. Can't blame them, they are in their late 80's. I have a major problem with Microsoft pushing out encryption hidden in an update. Encryption may be useful to most people, but those people should be making that decision, not some all powerful software company. If I thought I had the time and patience left, Id move them both onto Apple machines, but that would be starting over. Best I can do now is make sure their computers do not allow automatic updates.....
Where I am working at currently has the exact same issue. Literally everyone has been auto-enrolled with BitLocker without the permission or knowledge. We found out when I had to do some upgrades on one computer and after I was done it asked for the recovery key. I have check the microsoft account do see the device in the account but without a Bitlocker recovery key. I checked Azure and found the device under the user but again no BitLocker recover key. EVERYONE DOES NOT HAVE A RECOVERY KEY. I HAD TO DECRYPT AND RECRYPT MY HARD DRIVE JUST TO GET ONE!!!
This RANSOMWARE without a ransom. Support is non-existent, telling me to go through third parties to recover the key.
So Microsoft please let me know what you are intending to do about this?
I had the same thing happen to me today. I see your post was from 8/25, I did not use this particular computer until today, but it appears to have been activated by itself.
