Unlocking Bitlocker

Question

I am not sure if this is the right area to post this but figured i would start here... so it all started with a hardware issue with the ac port plug that went bad and it ended up with a bad motherboard. As we replaced the port itself and realized the motherboard is bad, figured ok will just get a new laptop so let me pull out the hard drive and extract the data. This is when we realized the hard drive had bitlocker enabled and now we cannot extract anything. No one has any recollection of enabling this feature and no one has the passcode :-(. This is a family laptop and ALOT of needed data resides on it that we urgently need to extract. Been searching online for solutions but no luck. Any ideas or place I can take this to in order to help extract the data? I have the drive encased to be able to connect it via usb to my other work laptop. Any info is appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi @HGonzalez

I'm afraid this is not good news. If you don't have the passcode or the bitlocker recovery key, there is no way to recover the data. Is it possible that someone made a note of or had the recovery key emailed to them? It's worth checking email accounts etc. Unfortunately for you, this is by design as Bitlocker would be pretty pointless if you could simply break into the data.

There may be specialist data recovery companies, but this is going to cost you a lot.

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