XPS 13 Bitlocked after Bios update yesterday

Please clarify "Bitlocked".  Do you mean the BIOS is corrupted?  

Here is the link to Dell instructions for a Corrupted BIOS recovery

How to Recover the BIOS on a Dell Computer or Tablet | Dell US

I am not the only person. I Googled the topic. It seems many people have this problem after a Dell update

The computer now asks for a bitlock key to unlock the laptop. I never activated bitlock. The Dell software upgrade must have activated the Bitlock

Thank you so much. I will most definitely try this and give you feedback

Yes BIOS updates/Hardware Changes/ External devices can cause Bit Locker to Trigger. 

I hope you know which MSA was being used for Signing in to the machine. 

If yes 

Please visit 

https://account.microsoft.com/devices/recoverykey?refd=onedrive.live.com

Use same Microsoft account as you are using on problematic computer and you should be able to see your Bit Locker Key (48 all numbers) 

If you don't know your MSA, Bad news is Data is gone. 

As a last resource you can try resetting BIOS to default . Which may or may not work. 

Here is the fix from another Dell user from 2018

Solved: BitLocker: need a key but I never installed it - Dell Community

Hello Jphughan. Man you make my day, my month, my year.  I thought my life came to an end when I could not access my laptop. Your professionalism and eloquence and detailed description was so well done. I want to thank you profusely. If you ever come to Cape Town, South Africa please look me up. It will be an honour to thank you in person.

May the Universe bless you abundantly and exponentially. 

Kind regards

Werner

@Wolraad  Glad to hear you're ok again, and thanks for the kind words!  But given that you had such a close call, I have some recommendations for you:

• Update to the latest release of Dell Update, which I believe is 4.0 or slightly higher.  It should automatically suspend BitLocker for future BIOS updates.
• Back up your Recovery Key to some location that you would be able to access even if your laptop was unusable.
• If you weren't already doing this, start backing up your data on a regular basis.  You may even want to consider making periodic image backups so that you can always restore your entire OS and application environment quickly, as opposed to only having backups of your personal data.  There are several applications that can do this.  Macrium Reflect is a popular choice, and even its Free version has sufficient functionality for making occasional image backups if you would be backing up your personal data more regularly using another solution.  That way even if your entire system becomes unbootable for some reason, you have a quick way to get back to a working state.

Good luck!

My apologies for not responding earlier. With my laptop being out of action things wrre in a bit of disarray. Thanx for your effort in responding.

Be blessed

Kind regards

Here is what worked for me (pasted from MS community support):

"It takes me to https://myaccount.microsoft.com/ which is a landing page I've yet to see. On the left hand bar I see devices, third option down. Click on that, AND THERE IS THE EFFING COMPUTER!!!!! I click "View BitLocker keys" and it shows the BitLocker ID of the "bricked" computer, I click "Show Recovery Key" and thar she blows. On the "bricked" laptop I type this in and bingo, we are doing a full reset. I'm doing a full full reset because it's brand new, and I definitely want to make sure that I'm not carrying over a user id and password. Hope this helps."

I have an xps 9360 and experienced the exact same issue. I had never used bitlocker, nor heard of it before yesterday. The above link worked for me to locate the bitlocker key.

Hey @jphughan , I have been trying to use the Dell bios flash update utility (the "F12" menu) to load the previous BIOS version (2.15.1), but for me when I start the flash update process, the first thing the machine does is reboot and then display the bitlocker recovery key prompt again. It never starts the flashing process. Is there an additional step to take? I have tried setting up a Windows PE USB boot stick and running the bios EXE from there, but same deal. I also tried following Dell's steps for creating a DOS boot drive, but from there running the bios EXE gave me a message that it could not be run in DOS (even though the description says that it can be run from any Windows or DOS environment).

To be clear: my wife's XPS 13 9360 received the 2.16 bios update. When it completed, on next boot she is presented with the bitlocker recovery key prompt. She has no recovery key saved in her MSA/OneDrive and we don't have any record of saving it somewhere silly like the local drive or printing it out and losing it somewhere. I have the bitlocker recovery keys for all the other machines in the house saved to my microsoft account. I would not have thought bitlocker was enabled on this laptop.

@kwood1138  Sorry you’re having trouble. When I’ve used that utility, I just format the flash drive as FAT32 and then copy the EXE for the desired BIOS release to the drive. Are you using FAT32? Have you tried another flash drive? I’ve encountered occasional problems with high capacity flash drives (above 32 GB), although that’s admittedly when trying to boot from them rather than trying to read a file from them within a flash utility. If you’re already using FAT32 with the correct EXE as the only file present, and you’ve tried another flash drive, then unfortunately I’m not immediately sure what to suggest next. Sorry!

@kwood1138  The only other idea I had was to ask if the flash drive connected directly to the system, i.e. not through any sort of hub or adapter?  If so, then I don't have any other suggestions right now.  I've never encountered that behavior or seen it discussed around here.

@jphughan Yep, connected right into the side of the laptop. Oh well. Thanks anyway!