BitLocker Error

Question

Hi, I'm experiencing an error, an external hard drive of mine is BitLocker encrypted and I cant remember the password for it, and they recovery key I found in my PC's bitlocker settings doesnt unlock the drive through CMD... (i'm having to use CMD as when I try and open the Drive through the GUI, i get an error saying the BitLocker encryption isn't compatible with this version of windows)... This drive is pretty important to me, please help!

Thanks.

Answer 1

The purpose of BitLocker is to prevent access to the data on disk unless the user has the password or the recovery key(s). If you don't remember the password and your recovery key(s) are bad then you are in that same category. The drive is inaccessible and the data on it is unrecoverable. That's a danger to using BitLocker.

My gut instinct is that your recovery key is good but the drive is not readable so you get the error saying it isn't. Since you cannot open the drive using the UI then I wouldn't expect the CLI to work either. Under the hood they are using the same infrastructure so having one work and not the other would be odd.

What version of Windows were you using when you originally encrypted the drive? You could create a VM (or go get one of the Microsoft-provided images) and temporarily attach your BL drive to it. Then verify the UI can open it with the recovery key. Decrypt the drive and then attach it to your new system. Once it is attached then you can encrypt it again and get the new recovery key.