Question PC died, plugging the HDD into another PC as an external drive asks for a BitLocker key - which we don't have

[MrYossu]

My son's school has a PC that died. He took the HDD out, and plugged it into another PC as an external drive, hoping to be able to recover the files, so he could transfer them to a new PC. However, it asked him for a BitLocker key.

As far as he knows, no-one ever activated or used BitLocker on the old PC, so of course no-one knows the key.

Is there any way he can recover the files? And no, the school never did any backups 🙄. They've learnt that lesson now though!

Thanks

 

[stonecarver]

My son's school has a PC that died. He took the HDD out, and plugged it into another PC as an external drive, hoping to be able to recover the files, so he could transfer them to a new PC. However, it asked him for a BitLocker key.

Welp how dead is the old PC. Anything we can do to get it on life support to get those files.

 

[beyondlogic]

My son's school has a PC that died. He took the HDD out, and plugged it into another PC as an external drive, hoping to be able to recover the files, so he could transfer them to a new PC. However, it asked him for a BitLocker key.

As far as he knows, no-one ever activated or used BitLocker on the old PC, so of course no-one knows the key.

Is there any way he can recover the files? And no, the school never did any backups 🙄. They've learnt that lesson now though!

Thanks

system specs of the old pc and what operating system was it using.

if its pro version bitlocker is on it by default unless deactivated. most bit lockers are married to the motherboard or cpu that use tpm. this tpm and usually be turned off in the bios.
also bitlocker is usually married to the microsoft account that it was created with.

 

[BFG-9000]

For all versions of Windows 10, BitLocker automatic device encryption is enabled by default if during OOBE setup someone signed into a Microsoft Account or an Azure Active Directory account (it is not enabled by default if Windows was instead installed with local account, but can be manually set in Control Panel).

So all you need is to sign into that Microsoft Account using another PC to get your Bitlocker Recovery Key which is stored in the cloud.

 

[E S]

I am the son of MrYossu refered to in the question, ( I asked my father for advice & he posted the question for me) we managed to find the person with the Bitlocker key, but when I try to open the drive it says "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" I was wondering if there is still anything I could do.

 

[Misgar]

I'd pass the job over to a professional recovery agency, if data retrieval is that critical.

It will cost many hundreds of dollars, but if you attempt to "repair" the disk yourself, you could make things far worse.

Shame you didn't backup files to USB.