family laptop with lots of software and files on it failed to update and bit locker key not on emails

Question

Hello!

During the pandemic, my wife and I purchased at Lenovo laptop for general family use. It was an open box purchase at Best Buy Emeryvllle with no paperwork, back when they were not letting people go into buildings. I think the machine had windows 10, which eventually auto-updated to windows 11.

I am losing my job as of March 14th, and I would like to be able to use that laptop.

About 5+ weeks, ago, the laptop was trying to update windows, and it failed to complete the update, and got stuck.

I talked with Lenovo support, and they said try to paperclip the button slot, to get it to go into the Lenovo restart/reload mode.

When you do this it asks you for a bit locker key. I was at Best Buy today with the Geek Squad, and they helped me look at me and my wife's emails for Microsoft, and there was no big locker key in our personal emails. The guy also had me look in my current work Microsoft email, with no luck.

Frankly, because we bought it open box, with just the computer in the box, I'm not sure if I did all the setup stuff right on that computer.

However, we did buy it at a legitimate store, and it was technically, a new laptop/computer.

It would be really sad to me if we end up losing all the data, like music I worked on in Abelton, pictures we had stored on it, resumes that I worked on in my previous job search, and family history/files.

It is also extra disappointing to have all of this problems cascading down from a system update.

Lastly, I need to be job searching. I had purchased MS Word, MS PPT, and MS Excel for that laptop, and I'm also losing all of that software on that device.

Considering all of this, it would seem reasonable to me, that Microsoft employees would want to help recover the data and restore what we had/were using this laptop for. I have (this week) already been in touch with Lenovo techs, and the Best Buy "Geek Squad", and we have determined that we're stuck.

Please consider that I've already spent 5+ hours trying to fix this problem. I really feel like there should be a simple/not too complicated way to fix this. I really hope that there is!

Answer 1

If your drive is encrypted with Bitlocker, even Microsoft support cannot help to find the Bitlocker key, they have no access to that, the only place the Bitlocker Recovery key is automatically stored is on the associated Microsoft account on the link below, be sure to check any Microsoft account that may have been used on the PC and also any work or school account that may be linked to the PC.

https://account.microsoft.com/devices/recoverykey

Are you able to find the Bitlocker Recovery Key on any account that may have been used or linked to the laptop?

If not, do you have a safe backup of your files, or use a cloud service like OneDrive to sync your files online.

If you are unable to find the Bitlocker Recovery Key on any account that may have been used on that device, then I am sorry for the bad news, the only way to access that device is to create a bootable Windows 11 USB on another working PC and use that to clean install Windows and at the start of the installation, delete all partitions on the drive to remove the encryption, which will sadly result in loss of all data on the drive.

With regards to the Office apps you have purchased, you will not loose those, you can always re-install Office from your Microsoft account on this link without the need for a product key, it is a digital licence.

https://account.microsoft.com/services/