Windows 11 locked out after unseccessfull updates patching, bitlocker failed to unlock with this recovery key

Question

I have this interesting situation I am investigating. A user force rebooted his Windows 11 computer after last 08-2024 patches were installing and computer hanged. After that, computer restarts only to Recovery Enviroment. There, I go to the option to uninstall last qumulative update and get into Bitlocker recovery.

1. From Entra ID, I do get recovery key for this drive. Also the date of drive encryption matches I see on screen.
2. Entering Recovery key gives me the error "failed to unlock with this recovery key"
3. I go to command promt, it also asks for recovery key and fails with same error
4. I launch the computer with Windows 11 bootable USB media, and see in partitioning that the drive is connected and size is correct (so the SSD disk is not broken).

I am a little amazed, can this really happen that with correct recovery key, you still cannot access the drive?

Answer 1

Hello,

In my experience, after a major hardware change or some changes in the system, Bitlocker may suddenly lock automatically, or something that you described.

The only workaround for this situation is to reset the device.

Best Regards,

Hania Lian

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Answer 2

I finally discovered that the SSD drive in that laptop was broken. Windows Recovery enviroment did not see the drive with diskpart disk listing. Installation management did see the drive size and partitions. But finally when I gave up on recovery and started to install Windows 11 as clean install, I realized that the drive might be broken because it took 2 hours to drop Windows files during installation which usually takes 5min.