Can't boot into Windows despite having BitLocker recovery key

Question

I woke up Monday morning to my 3-yr-old XPS 15 9570 asking me to "enter the recovery key" to get back into my Windows 10 (Home) desktop.

I spent the rest of the day reading hundreds of forum posts, chatting with Microsoft techs, tweaking BIOS startup settings per suggestions in various posts here and at the MS community forums, and searching desperately for a Bitlocker encryption key which until that morning I didn't even know was a thing. I eventually found it that evening in the most obscure of places, in an Azure account associated with my son's high school distance learning account. Turns out, for a brief period in the fall of last year, he used my laptop to access his school's MS Office 365 apps.

By this time, however, after multiple starts and stops, the laptop wasn't going straight from the keyboard layout page to the recovery field page as it did initially. Now, it was going to the Troubleshooting-to-Advanced Options page. So I started with Startup Repair in the Advanced Options menu, put in the key. The wheels turned for a few seconds but couldn't repair the laptop.

All the other Advanced Options failed except for Command Prompt. I could finally unlock the drive and get in it. Today, I spent the better part of the day by running diagnostics and startup repairs on the hard drive. I started with SFC /SCANNOW. It failed due to "Windows Resource Protection." BOOTREC /FIXMBR completed successfully, but BOOTREC /FIXBOOT was denied access.BOOTREC /Rebuildbcd failed because it couldn't find the boot path. CHKDSK didn't find any problems. I don't know what else I've tried--honestly, it's all a blur now.

I finally decided that it was time to save as many personal files as I could using COPY and XCOPY commands, and do a clean install. It was tedious but I did manage to copy a lot files to USB drives. But the one thing I couldn't do was accces the folders and files that I had on the desktop. I could see everything in all the other folders but whenever I went into the users/... /desktop folders (both in the Public and the %USERPROFILE% folders), I couldn't see any of the folders or individual files that I had on the desktop, and those are some of my most immediate and most important documents.

Still, I was a single click away from starting the process of wiping the partitions and starting with a fresh install tonight. But then I thought: after two full days of full-on crazy, why not take a little more time to consider my options, and reach out for a little help. And that is what I'm doing now. If I had my druthers, I'd much rather take my old system back. But I'll be happy enough if I could somehow get access to those items that resided on my desktop. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd very much appreciate it!

jphughan · Accepted Answer

@iJoMun Reflect's Rescue Media builder can (and by default does) embed BitLocker auto-unlock keys for any BitLocker volumes that are unlocked at the time you create the Rescue Media, but if you created it on some other system, I'm not sure how this unbootable XPS system that's prompting for a Recovery Key would have already had its partition unlocked when you booted into Rescue Media. The only way that should be possible on a BitLocker volume is if BitLocker protection is suspended, but in that case you wouldn't be seeing a Recovery Key prompt either. Something isn't adding up there, because obviously if it was possible for somebody to create bootable media on one system that automagically unlocked BitLocker volumes on a completely different system, that would defeat the entire point of encryption.

In any case, if the image backup completed without reporting errors and your Desktop folder is still empty, then that result plus your earlier findings from trying to access data via Command Prompt suggests to me that the data is no longer on the disk at all. Did you perhaps redirect your Desktop folder to store its content in some other location? Windows does allow that. If that doesn't account for this, then I'm not sure what exactly happened here, but I don't think any other method will make your data appear where you're looking for it.

AdrianG001 · Answer

If you look at the drive with Disk Management, is there another partition, maybe one without a drive letter, that's encrypted? Maybe an efi or boot partition?

jphughan · Answer

@iJoMun If you were using Command Prompt in the Windows Recovery environment and still couldn't see the contents of your Desktop folder, then I'm not sure what would have happened there, but one thing you could do is create bootable media that allows you to browse your drive graphically and can also make an image backup of it. Macrium Reflect can do both of those things, and even its Free version is sufficient for this. Hopefully you have access to some other working PC, but if so, you'd install Reflect Free on it and then use its Rescue Media Builder wizard to create a bootable flash drive. Boot your XPS system from that flash drive, and then since you've got BitLocker you'll first need to unlock that partition in Rescue. To do that, click the Command Prompt icon in the taskbar and first run "manage-bde -status". Check the drive letter assigned to the Windows partition, which may or may not be C in Rescue. Then enter "manage-bde -unlock C: -RecoveryPassword 123456-123456....", substituting the drive letter and your actual 48-digit Recovery Key as appropriate.

Once it unlocks, in the taskbar there's also a folder icon to launch a basic file explorer if you want to try browsing around that way, and from there you can also perform basic file operations (copy, move, etc.). And then you can also use Reflect itself to make an image backup of that entire disk before you wipe it just in case you think you might have forgotten about something and might want it later. If you have an image backup, you can use Reflect later on to mount any partitions within it as a virtual disk that you can then browse to extract whatever individual files/folders you need. And if you make an image backup while the drive is unlocked, then the image will NOT have encryption within it.

iJoMun · Answer

I don't know how to run Disk Management in the recovery environment. 'diskmgmt.msc' command isn't recognized.

iJoMun · Answer

@jphughan

Thank you for your detailed response. It was a great suggestion. I got the 30-day trial version of Macrium Reflect and created a rescue USB drive. I booted up on it. Didn't have use the key to unlock the drive as it was already unlocked. I created a full image backup of the system drive. However, when I used the file explorer to browse the user folder, I did not find any of the files or folders that resided on the desktop. It's really puzzling. I'm at wit's end. Try as I may, I can't go back into Windows, and I can't find those files and folders that I really don't want to lose. I am quickly running out of options.

iJoMun · Answer

@jphughan Exactly. I don't understand how the drive could be unlocked once I booted up on Rescue Media. It's true that I executed MANAGE-BDE -UNLOCK a few times when I was booting into recovery using Windows installation media, but I still had to reuse the key every time I shut down and wanted to get back in. It's worth noting that since booting up with Macrium rescue media today I am no longer getting the prompt, even if I'm booting up using Windows installation media.

I am quite sure I didn't redirect the Desktop to some other folder--that simply would not have occurred to me--but I did yesterday look inside the OneDrive folder just in case.

I agree with you that there is really no other way to find the missing folders. I was holding onto the quickly-fading hope that perhaps I could find a way to boot into my old desktop but that prospect now seems distant possibility as well. I think it's time to bite the bullet and do a fresh install. Thank you for your help. It really made a difference!

XPS

Can't boot into Windows despite having BitLocker recovery key

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