XPS 13 9365 - Howto Retrieve bitlocker key in Windows 10 Home

Contrary to the post by @Mary G  above, Windows 10 Home when installed on hardware that meets certain requirements offers "Device encryption", which offers a limited set of BitLocker capabilities, including the ability to encrypt your OS partition, which it does using BitLocker under the hood.  I'm sitting on an XPS 13 9350 with Windows 10 Home that has BitLocker enabled right now.  Dell for a while now has been shipping their systems with BitLocker "pre-staged", i.e. with the disk encrypted but BitLocker in suspended mode so that it behaves as an unencrypted disk.  If the user chooses to link their Windows logon account to their Microsoft account, then BitLocker is "fully enabled" (which happens instantaneously because the sectors were already encrypted) and the Recovery Key gets backed up to the user's Microsoft account.  Unfortunately none of this is explained to the user, and even the Recovery Key prompt doesn't suggest looking in a Microsoft account, which has led to a number of threads on this forum and elsewhere just like this one, where users are seeing a Recovery Key prompt and have no idea where to find it because they didn't even realize BitLocker was enabled in the first place.

So @clarupe  you might want to look at this guide for the link to log into your Microsoft account and view any Recovery Keys.

Windows Home does not have Bitlocker. It might be asking for a diff password possibly your MS Account password. 

@clarupe  as an alternative, if you're just trying to set up your PC again from scratch, then you don't need the BitLocker Recovery Key at all because you can just wipe everything currently on the disk and start over.  The exact way to do that will depend on how exactly you're trying to "reset" your PC.  My recommendation would be to use some other PC to download the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool directly from Microsoft and create a bootable Windows 10 installation flash drive.  Boot your XPS 13 from that, and then when you get to the point of the wizard asking where you want to install Windows, click "Drive options (advanced)" to expose a delete option and delete every partition on your internal disk until the only entry for that disk shows as "Unallocated space", then proceed.  Be very careful NOT to delete partitions on any OTHER disks you might have attached and might therefore have partitions listed in that wizard interface.  The internal SSD will be listed as Disk 0.

Thank you for your response, i have gone into my microsoft account and there is no recovery key.

@clarupe  in that case if you never linked any other Microsoft account to your laptop that might have that Recovery Key stored and you don't have any other backup of it, then you won't be able to unlock that drive.  Although once again if you're trying to perform a clean install anyway, you don't need to unlock the drive before you wipe it.  You can just delete all existing partitions on disk even while the OS partition is locked and then start from scratch.

@jphughan  Once i create my usb win 10 drive and wipe out the hard drive how do i get the windows serial number, isn't it stored on the hard drive.

I found a site which describes the process.  I found it interesting that a system on a Domain does not use online key storage and that the version of the TPM makes a difference.  As far as I know, TPM 2.0 is standard now and I remember a download on the Dell site allowing mine to be updated from 1.2 to 2.0. but my system is 2 years old.

This is a Microsoft site so it should be fine.

MS Bitlocker page

The 9365 will be enabled Bitlocker even with a clean install of Win 10.  The key should be online, as mentioned.  

Most of the time, I never even needed the key since I wasn't even aware it had been Bitlocked.  So I could turn off the Bitlocker and was fine after that.

Something you might check is to open an administrative command prompt.  Type the command below and see if one of the lines in the listing refers to Bitlocker.

bcdedit

If you can't get into your system, the line basically tells you where to find the key in the Microsoft account.  If you want to see it you should be able to boot to install or recovery media and use that command prompt window.

@clarupe  glad to hear you're out of the woods.  To check whether your OS partition is encrypted at this point, go to Start > Settings > Update & Security, and then select the "Device encryption" item in the left sidebar.  For what it's worth, there's certainly value to encrypting your hard drive in case your laptop gets stolen, but obviously you'd want to make sure to back up your Recovery Key to a location you'd be able to access without your PC.  Good luck!

@jphughan Thanks again for all your help. I checked the setting and i appears that it is automatically turned on when you install windows 10. Since i have a Microsoft account it added my device along with the recovery key to my account.

I would imagine if you didn't have an account you would never know.... 

Microsoft should warn you about this during installation.