Any way to unlock drive locked by BitLocker?

2

My wife's laptop loads straight into a prompt asking for a BitLocker password.

The encryption is on our Win7 boot drive so no way to boot into safe mode or something similar.

If I quit out of this it goes into something like windows recovery. I can quit out of this and go into an option screen which has an option to go to command prompt.

I assume some sort of virus enabled this because my wife wouldn't have gone through the process to turn it on herself.

Please help, this drive contains baby photos and we have no backup :(

When I type manage-bde d: -protectors -get it shows TPM and Numerical Password but these are not the required 48 character password I can use to unlock. I assume that's because I am not logged in as administrator so I can't see the correct password??

UPDATE: When the system boots initially it says 'the system boot information has changed since bitlocker was enabled'. Not sure if there is any way to roll back? At the bottom of this message it says "otherwise restore the system boot information" not sure if this is possible?

going

Posted 2013-03-21T08:35:18.857

Reputation: 241

Answers

2

I have managed to recover my password and I'm adding this as an answer because it may help other HP laptop owners.

Tldr; On your hp laptop there should be 2 extra partitions with tools and recovery software. These are E: and F: drive on my laptop. Under F:\Hewlett_Packard the key is stored in a file Bitlocker_Recovery_Key

Now into a bit more background info. It turns out that last night (my wife now tells me) there was Service Pack update that downloaded and failed. This somehow changed some configuration info. Bitlocker noticed a change from the original configuration and decided to keep itself in lockdown.

After locating the key it is currently while I type on my phone, reverting those changes.

FYI just do others know, if you receive automatic updates and you have Bitlocker on (whether you know it or not) you are at risk of having your HD unrecoverably Bitlocked.

I was just lucky and manually looke through all the drives and stumbled across the key in one of the HP partitions.

going

Posted 2013-03-21T08:35:18.857

Reputation: 241

Switch off BitLocker before updating, ha! :P – pratnala – 2013-03-21T10:11:00.240

1BitLocker was already enabled, maybe from HP – AndreaCi – 2013-03-21T10:27:26.477

@pratnala - I wasn't aware that it was enabled and the updates come at random times, so not sure if this is a good approach. – going – 2013-03-21T21:49:53.997

Asked: 2013-03-21T08:35:18.857

Viewed: 3 618 times

Active: 2013-10-20T11:34:31.130