Bitlocker issue...

Not without putting it back in your old notebook that I know of, and yes for some unknown reason Dell is sending some of these notebooks out with bit locker activated, I found out very early and was able to get the key from my MS Account and disabled it.

The encryption is looking for the same hardware set up as it was activated with.

It might be possible for MS to recover it for you since it was there in your MS Account as some point 

@GACollier  Dell ships systems with BitLocker "staged", i.e. with the data technically encrypted but with the decryption key also stored on the disk so that it behaves as an unencrypted partition.  If you choose to link your Windows logon account to your Microsoft account, then a Recovery Key is supposed to be backed up to that account and then BitLocker is fully enabled, i.e. the decryption key is scrubbed from the disk.  And since the data was already encrypted, this "encryption" happens basically instantly.

At least that's how it's supposed to work.  But I've also seen multiple reports like this, so it appears that it doesn't always operate as intended.  Making matters worse, this whole BitLocker setup is completely silent.  I understand the value of encrypting people's devices (smartphones do the same thing), and I can even get behind this behind the default behavior since most people wouldn't go out of their way to do that themselves -- but if I were designing this experience, I would have a popup that said, "Hey, we've enabled encryption on your hard drive.  Your encryption solution includes a Recovery Key.  You might it some day, so you should absolutely know that it exists and where to find it.  We've already backed it up to your Microsoft account, which you can access at this link.  We've also displayed it below if you want to store another copy in some other safe place.  Click here when you're ready to proceed."  But that's not what we have today.

Unfortunately, if you don't have your Recovery Key, your data is inaccessible.  You never needed it in your old system because that system's TPM chip had the decryption key stored within it, and it released it automatically as long as it didn't detect any hardware or firmware changes that could signal an attempt to compromise the key (in which case it would refuse to release the key and you'd have to enter the Recovery Key to have it trust the new configuration.)  But without that TPM chip, then the Recovery Key is the only way to decrypt the data in a default BitLocker setup.  There is no bypass.

Thanks guys. I really don’t remember activating this option but who knows at this point. The laptop is about a year old. 

Just to confirm though, there’s no way to boot to a USB running unbuntu or Linux and mounting this drive?

@GACollier  If you don't have the Recovery Key, then you're not going to be able to access the contents of that drive no matter how you mount it. If it were possible to access that data without a Recovery Key by simply booting into Linux, then that would defeat the entire purpose of the encryption.  As far as I know, BitLocker's encryption implementation does not have any backdoors or known vulnerabilities that would allow you to access the data some other way.  You can of course still delete that partition, wipe the drive, etc. in order to set it up from scratch without knowing the Recovery Key, but you may have already known that.