i know all about it, and this will make data recovery service i do a knightmare. if it move full to the home market, witch i can see it doing so, with windows 11 starting to lock everyting down, will be good in the long run for some reasons, "everying happens for a reason" to quote.
Bitlocker enabled itself on Windows 10 Home edition without a notice and without permission
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.
Windows for home | Windows 10 | Security and privacy
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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Anonymous
2023-10-04T23:30:51+00:00 -
Anonymous
2023-10-04T23:11:22+00:00 Go to the search box and type encryption. Device Encryption Settings will appear. Click on it. Turn Encryption On or Off is on the first page. There is an entry beneath it called Related Settings which has a link to Bitlocker Settings.
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Anonymous
2023-10-04T22:08:06+00:00 i have 4 drives on my dell storing movies, and if i format and reinstall for eg, dell ,6th gen win 10 pro, its will start auto encrypting all my drives, sais it will take 7 days, **** off, bitlocker, turned off tpm in the bios, fixed that, lol
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Anonymous
2023-10-04T22:03:29+00:00 also reason i say about OEM and microsoft , Dell been ableing it by defalt since gen 6 intel, but only on pro install, pain in the **** , to turn it off, im working from home, not at work i dont need it , lol
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Anonymous
2023-10-04T21:59:34+00:00 my newest laptop that came with 11, i put it back to 10 hp has drivers for both so why not, , so much better, windows 11 too many updates every week because its in the workings, mabey windows 12 next year will be better, , in the history of microsoft every Other OS is a success, .