Bitlocker Forever Unlocking

Thanks ejn63.  I ran the diagnostics originally - it states 'All tests passed'.  Not sure what you mean by extended diagnostics?  I only had one Diagnostics option in the menu brought up by F12.

Cheers,

David. 

Before going further, run an extended diagnostic on the drive (F12 at powerup to get to the Dell Diagnostics).

Once the initial, quick diagnostics run, there should be an option to run selective diagnostics, which are much more thorough. 

Is the drive in question a hard drive or a solid state drive?

Thanks, yes I found it - arrow down the bottom right of the screen takes one to the selective tests, with the option to select Thorough Test Mode.  It passed all the tests, including Hard Drive 1-0-9 and OS Boot Path 1-0-9.

My machine's fitted with a SSD.

Regards,

David.

@Dave2-dck  If BitLocker was the problem, then it wouldn’t accept your PIN and even attempt to boot. Based on the behavior you described both before and after the reboot, it sounds like your Windows environment itself has a problem, which would be independent of any BitLocker setup. If you had an image backup, you could just restore that. If not, you could try the Windows Recovery tools to run System Restore. If that fails and you can’t fix it manually, you’d probably be in for a manual reinstallation of Windows and everything else.

Make a bootable USB Drive using Windows media creation tool 

Reboot via USB Drive. 

Choose install Now, Custom 

Now Press shift + F10 to launch Command prompt 

Type following commands. 

manage-bde -unlock C: -RecoveryPassword YOUR-BITLOCKER-RECOVERY-INCLUDING DASHES

If done correctly you will get prompt "The password has successfully unlocked volume C" . Now type following command

manage-bde -off C:

It will start decrypting the drive. You will have type following command several time to check decryption status 

manage-bde status

Command will give you conversation status which will reduce every few minutes. Once drive is decrypted, the conversion status will change to "Fully decrypted" 

Now you are free to play and you can try any of the following

1. You can close command prompt and close this windows to reboot to windows 10

OR 

2. you can choose C drive and hit next on same windows to perform a parallal install of window which will overwrite correct operating system without deleting your personal files. It will remove all the applications though.  

Thanks @XPS_Man  and @jphughan  for your replies - has taken me a couple of days to get back to this.

After following your steps @XPS_Man to boot from USB and open the command prompt, after entering manage-bde -unlock C -RecoveryPassword and , after several minutes the command prompt screen just shows a flashing cursor under the line beginning "Copyright..." in your screenshot above.  I.e. there is no confirmation that it unlocked the volume.  Just like in the other contexts I posted, it seems to be stalled unlocking.  Am I right that the unlock step in this process should be fast, and it's only the subsequent decrypt process that one would expect to take a while?

Does this suggest that it is bad Bitlocker metadata, bad SSD, bad TPM, or something else?

Cheers,

David.

Yes Unlock should happen instantly 

Even if you didn't receive any confirmation 

Try

manage-bde -off C:

Thanks @XPS_Man. I should clarify the it was clear the command was still running, so had to hit to get back to command prompt.  Any further manage-bde commands (-off, -status) after this resulted in the same behaviour - i.e. they hang.

I rebooted from USB back to the command prompt again and tried manage-bde -off C:, which not surprisingly resulted in an error that the operation could not be performed because the drive is locked.

I followed exactly the same steps on another Dell laptop encrypted with Bitlocker and it unlocked at the command prompt exactly as you have described.  So I'm confident I'm following your suggestions correctly, confirming the the original machine cannot unlock for some reason.

I suspect I'm at the end of the road here in terms of recovering anything from the drive?  I have backups so at this point I think my time's better off spent just getting on with a rebuild.  I'd still like to test the SSD somehow though as even if a format and re-install appeared to work, I don't know that could trust it, not knowing the root cause.  My reading on Bitlocker and TPM suggests the TPM is not at fault in this situation as if it were I'd still be able to unlock with the recovery key as unlocking with the recovery key doesn't rely on the TPM - is that correct?  So the question is, could it be anything other than a faulty SSD?  Maybe I should just replace it, and use as an opportunity to upgrade capacity.

Cheers,

David.

I ran into such trouble years ago, problem was the Bad mechanical drive and needed replacement. 

But it's too early to suspect a Bad drive, my suggestions previously were an attempt to save data. 

However if you are ready to loose data on the drive  

Warning : This WILL WIPE THE DRIVE 

Boot from USB 

Open command prompt on the same window

Diskpart 

List disk 

Now assuming that SSD is disk number 0 type following 

Select Disk 0 

Clean 

Exit 

Now click on Refresh and you will have an unallocated space, select that and hit Next 

Windows installation should proceed. 

Thanks @XPS_Man.  I'm going to pursue recovering the data a little further.  Whilst I have backups of important data, I don't have an imagine backup.

Currently awaiting a suitably sized external USB drive such that I can try a repair-bde on the drive.

Happy to hear any other recommendations for Bitlocker recovery tools.

I'll report back how I go with repair-bde.

Cheers,

David.

Thanks @XPS_Man.  I attempted to recover the data using repair-bde, but then I then the external drive to which I recovered to failed.  Ended up rebuilding from scratch and restoring data from backups.  Have a system image backup as well now.

Cheers,

David.