Bitlocker should drop 'it' and just call it Blocker

Yup Feature of one is Trouble for another. 

@Mickm720  You better get used to it, Windows 11 is making TPM a mandatory hardware feature. So either keep your Key with you or Decrypt the hard drive as soon you get it. 

Anyways www.onedrive.com/recovery 

Try this link and sign using same microsoft account as your computer you will find your keys. 

Thanks but I never asked for bitlocker to activate and didn't know it existed until my laptop was unusable. I supposedly was given a key via my Microsoft account and it doesn't work. Hence my desperation. And looking around here I'm not the only one who was surprised one day when their laptops were unusable. If Dell provides a solution I will be happy to post it here so some future victim might be lucky enough to stumble upon it. It would do so much more for future customers if they would just prevent this from happening. You can find others here who reported this happening to them years ago. 

The original thread "BitLocker: need a key but I never installed it" is now locked, so I can no longer post in it. But I will post this reply on any threads that I can to help with this problem.

I made an account on these forums for the sole purpose of discussing this problem. This exact thing happened to me. I was using my laptop, it decided that it needed to do some updates, so I let it update and restart. To my surprise, when it restarted, I was greeted with the infamous "Bitlocker recovery" screen.

I spent 3 weeks trying to solve this problem. None of the solutions regarding changing settings anywhere on these forums were successful. I tried everything I could in regards to TPM, PTT, factory resetting, clearing keys, updating the bios, downgrading the bios, removing the battery, letting it sit for a while, but the problem would not go away. Here is what I have learned and how to potentially solve this problem:

- The Bitlocker key is stored in a Microsoft account. This much is certain. You might think that a Microsoft account is only something on the live, outlook, Hotmail, or office 365 domains. This is completely FALSE. I had logged in to my computer using my Gmail account, and by doing so, it created a Microsoft account for me with my Gmail account as my alias. So I had a Microsoft account with a Gmail account as the login. This should not be possible, but yet, it is. Moral of this note: Do not assume an account is not a Microsoft account, try EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. It could be your Gmail, it could be your work email, your school email, your sister’s email, your son’s email, anything is fair game.

- A "Microsoft account" is a very vague term. One account will allow you access to certain Microsoft services, whereas another will not. How do you check this? There are at least 4 different ways to log into a Microsoft account:

https://account.microsoft.com
https://myaccount.microsoft.com
https://mysignins.microsoft.com/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/account

If you try to log in to your account via one of the links above, sometimes it will tell you that your Microsoft account does not exist. DO NOT BELIEVE THIS. Try all of the links above to ensure that this is true, because in my case, the email where my key was located did not “exist” according to the first 3 links. It only existed on the Azure portal.

- As mentioned above, I used my Gmail to log into my computer. When I logged into my Gmail Microsoft account using the account.microsoft link, I did indeed see my computer listed under devices, but there were no Bitlocker keys associated with this account. I have absolutely no idea why Microsoft decided to associate the key with a different account, but this is exactly what happened.

- I tried various personal emails, work emails, and school emails, and none of them claimed to have the Bitlocker key. Or so I thought. Finally, I tried an account that I had used ONLY for Microsoft Teams, and while it claimed to not exist via the usual login routes, it was linked to the schools Azure Active Directory. Unfortunately, I did not have administrative access to this account so I could not see what it was associated with, and had to contact the IT department of the school. From there, I gave them the email, and they searched through my account and sure enough, there was a Bitlocker key associated with my account.

I know that this is an extremely long reply, but the files on my laptop were incredibly valuable to me, and I sure hope that this helps someone else to recover from this insane problem. If anyone would like to file a CLA against Microsoft for encrypting files without user interaction or confirmation, I would be happy to participate.

TL:DR – Bitlocker recovery was triggered after updates, and locked the computer. Tried various different accounts, none claimed to have Bitlocker key associated with it. Account used to log in to the computer showed that it was in fact linked to the computer, but no key was present in the account. Bitlocker key was finally in a school account that was used only for Microsoft Teams. At first glance this account did not contain the key, but after contacting the IT department, they found the key.

I really hope this helps someone, and going forward, PLEASE CHECK IF BITLOCKER IS ENABLED TO AVOID HAVING THIS HAPPEN TO YOU

I realize you posted this last year but I came on desperate to find a solution to get into my XPS laptop SSD drive. We spent two weeks in Hawaii and all of my photos were on it when someone knocked over a large amount of water directly on my keyboard. It shorted out and has remained dead. I was devastated about losing all of my photos. I came across your posting and it made sense - I had no idea it Bitlock pass code would be stored on my Microsoft account so thank you so very much. All of my files are now copied to another drive and are backed up.