Back in January Microsoft encrypted all my hard drives without saying anything. I was playing around with a dual boot yesterday and somehow aggravated Secureboot. So my C: panicked and required a 40 character key to unlock.

Your key is backed up to the Microsoft account associated with your install. Which is considerate to the hackers. (and saved me from a re-install) But if you’ve got an unactivated copy, local account, or don’t know your M$ account credentials, your boned.

Control Panel > System Security > Bitlocker Encryption.

BTW, I was aware that M$ was doing this and even made fun of the effected users. Karma.

  • HarmlessCake@discuss.tchncs.de
    31·
    15 days ago

    This was the exact same situation I experienced with my old Surface 6. Started to look into Linux firmware on Surface devices and deactivated secure boot because it wouldn’t boot Ventoy at all and do nothing, so I figured to try again with no secure boot. It still didn’t work so I turned it on again, but was then greeted with this Bitlocker screen which I didn’t even know it had activated up until this point. I set up a local account so I had no key to reset or something and was literally not able to do anything besides reinstalling the entire system.

    Luckily I had nothing important on it lol

    Weirdly the activation was saved on the MS servers so I didn’t need to do that again at least (was a preinstalled system so I wouldn’t have known the activation key anyways, I thought “When it doesn’t work I’ll switch to Linux fully because I’m not paying for that garbage system”).

    After I updated Ventoy I was able to boot again even with secure boot on, there seems to have been an issue with that specific version.

    I had Windows on my device since I bought it (around 2018) only upgraded to W11. It never mentioned anything about Bitlocker before this incident so if I had important stuff on it it would have been so over. Well, never save important files on Windows without backup is what I got out of it

    This caused me literally bigger problems than my switch to Arch Linux after having only used Windows the entire time xD