Woke up to laptop becoming bitlocked

[regal parrot]

Turned off my Windows 11 Dell G15 Ryzen Edition laptop last night after the night light function wouldn’t work. I woke up today and turned my laptop on only to find that it’s been bitlocked.

Even worse, this device isn’t listed on my Microsoft account despite having logged into my Microsoft account on this device.

Is there any way I can access this drive or find my recovery key? I have the ID, so the recovery key has to be somewhere right?

This also happened back in July under a different screen, and I actually had the key from before. I don’t remember how I fixed this because I came across this screen multiple times.

[keen mason]

this one, right?

[regal parrot]

yea

it’s kinda hopeless to recover it any point

i looked through many solutions, contacted data recovery businesses

i have to factory reset

so, i do that, and now the drive’s completely inaccessible

here’s something funny—it gave me the option to recover my files, yet they were all 0 KB, so i couldnt even click next even when checking these items

also what i assume to be the recovery key text file is also 0 kb (i’ve tried to view this text file—it’s blank)

[keen mason]

well, if it's a lost cause and you can't recover
let's do the classic microsoft community tactic ™️ of jumping the gun and clean installing windows

except we're gonna do it different in your case because bitlocker is a

[keen mason]

(mentioning)

[regal parrot]

i assume you mean in the USB stick sorta way?

[keen mason]

yes i do

because i honestly don't know another way

so since windows is a bitch and will cry if we do linux first
let's just begin with windows first
you'll need an 8gb+ stick for this one

i mean we can do linux first but that requires gparted magic and i don't want to have to explain that over text

i should prob explain:
windows, right
we all love (hate) it
unfortunately sometimes we need to reinstall from a usb and all that
well, a 20gb rescue Ubuntu partition cuts the need of a second laptop
so as long as you don't fuck up the linux one
you're good

[regal parrot]

something my friends told me is that my SSD could be failing or the motherboard could have failed

Windows offered other recovery methods other than BitLocker but no other method worked

I couldn’t reset the PC, it would just end up as a failure

Windows couldn’t access any previous restore point

Windows couldn’t uninstall the latest feature update

Every viewable file from cmd line was 0 kb, including the .txt file labeled recovery

Windows also caught itself in an infinite restart loop, where it would try booting, then display an error message saying it failed to do so because it was in Safe Mode

When I go into the BIOS now, I can’t choose the SSD as a bootable drive anymore

Only the USB ports show up

[strange robin]

I don't have much hope for it unfortunately, even if your key is valid it'll likely be rejected as the disk is empty/dead.

[regal parrot]

yeah, my friends think that if it’s a drive failure maybe it’s recoverable, but i don’t have my hopes up

best option i have is to try and boot it with a flash drive

[regal parrot]

yeah, that worked. i just needed to reinstall windows from a USB drive

doesn’t mean the loss of 2 years of work hurts any less, tho

when i had asked others, they said an update microsoft pushed earlier this year auto-enabled bitlocker, so it sent the key to the microsoft account attached to the laptop

…the key was likely sent to a void account, since my laptop wasn’t connected to a microsoft account

[regal parrot]

this is prolly when the update hit my laptop finally

[velvet ermine]

bitlocker wasnt automatically enabled by updates