MicrosoftI am in dire need of help i had a IT guy Change out my hard drive on my laptop he said that he unlocked the Drive before he changed out the drive. so i bought this Laptop from Dell originally i didn't setup the Bitlocker. so now i can not get the Recovery Key due to the fact I don't have access to the Email that would have been used to setup the laptop day one also Microsoft is Screwing me over because i can't get any help to figure this out because Microsoft fell they are to good to help where they screw people by having these Computer Mfg setup Windows with BitLocker when the Computer is built!!! so if anyone can help that would be great if not i will never use a Microsoft product again and i will make it my mission to tell everybody to not but Microsoft this is ridicules
Thanks
I am sorry to hear about your tough situation. I think you're blaming the wrong person for your woes, however. The "IT Guy" that set up your PC did a sloppy job and caused your problem, not Microsoft. That person should be helping you unlock your computer.
If that person is of no further help, assuming the laptop doesn't have any data on it that you care about, you can blow away the hard drive and reinstall Windows. If you're tech savvy, you can do it yourself, otherwise find somebody locally to help you. High level steps:
Hope this helps.
Jess
The It guy said he did unencrypted the Drives before he started changing out the drive like I said then he migrated the C Drive to the D Drive so that after the Change all he would have to do is Migrate all the Info back to the New C drive I just would have never thought that this would have happened I could see if the Laptop drives would have been removed and tried to be installed in a completely different computer but sense the Operating System had never been removed from the laptop.
So when this laptop was originally received from dell I had a different email address which I do not have anymore which I had not been login to up until I need the drive replaced so like I said I didn't even know that BitLocker was even turned on or whatever. Even tried to reinstall the old drive back in the laptop but it is locked as well so we can not even try and retrieve the Key form it so I don't even know why there is no way to retrieve it I get that it is a security thing but as a none IT person I would wish there was a way??
Jess,
Well I do think Microsoft does carry some blame because I never setup this BitLocker thing and all I needed was to update a drive to a larger one and all the IT guy did was migrate my info from one drive to another on the same laptop and now I can't get to anything and Microsoft is now holding my intellectual Property Hostage with this BitLocker thing with no resolution!! And sense I didn't know this was active I would never have saved it just so you know I have several removable drives for this reason so I don't lose any info I have and if I had known this was active, I would have at least five or six copies of this Recovery Key
I hear where you are coming from. A better IT guy would have known he needed to decrypt the drive before apparently cloning the drive to a newer one. It doesn't seem like we'll agree on that point, and we don't need to, that's fine.
When you had the old drive in, were you logged into Windows with a "Microsoft Account"? Meaning a hotmail.com or outlook.com type account? If so, you can go to account.microsoft.com and then log in with your credentials. From there, you would click on "devices" on the far left of the screen. Find the device in question by name, click on the "info and support" area for that device, and then find the "manage recovery keys" link. That will take you to a page with your BitLocker recovery key. I'm hoping this might be an option for you to unlock the new drive and get back in.
