PSA Tech Tip - Turn off your Windows BitLocker settings

[Tpaktop2_1 NA]

Important: Microsoft Support is unable to provide, or recreate, a lost BitLocker recovery key.

 

It is always something new now once one problem gets fix, a new problem happens. My Wife had bad hinges on her laptop. She did not want me to fix it so she had me take it in to UbreakIfix store. While in the store, some liquid got spilled onto the motherboard. We don't know how, but expect it was coffee. The system then would not boot. They swapped out the mother board no charge to us. However, we now have a BitLocker problem because of the new board. 

 

My wife's laptop needs the BitLocker code because of the new MB, to bring the system up. However there are no printouts, no USB digital backup,  no BitLocker codes backed up on her Microsoft account. It was something she was never aware of. I would thought it would be an automatic function done in the background by Microsoft as a proactive process. However it is not so. Microsoft expects you to do those functions. And here we are.

 

To understand the BitLocker process and it was designed, it was to prevent bad players from taking over your system. It was designed for people like my father-in-law who clicks "yes" to every windows pop-ups just to get rid of the windows pop-up. Bless his heart. 

 

Source:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/find-your-bitlocker-recovery-key-6b71ad27-0b89-ea08-f143-056f5ab347d6

I have BitLocker turned off on my system because hearing of performance issues when gaming. It was a good thing because one of my hard drives died. I can understand Microsoft's POV because they want to sell software, but more so they don't want to get involve with a legal landmines of liabilities of who is the owner.

With my wife, would have to reinstall Windows 11 anew to get her system back. She really does not want to do that. It upsets her that she may lose all that 20 years worth of data. For now I will try different things to see if I can revive her laptop from this mess. Although I doubt it.

So if you are computer literate and have turned off Cortana on your Windows system already, turn off the BitLocker process for your sanity. You will be happier for the thought of it.

 

Edited January 7 by Tpaktop2_1 NA
typo

[Tpaktop2_1 NA]

Update: Interesting facts I found in trying to unlock my wife's drive.

From Tom's Hardware:

Quote

We tested BitLocker encryption last year and discovered SSD performance can drop by up to 45% depending on the workload. Even worse, if you are using the software form of BitLocker, all the encryption and decryption tasks get loaded onto the CPU, which can potentially reduce system performance as well.

Source here

And there appears to be a threshold limit in trying to access the drive after bitlocker is activated. From here the drive is totally lost in retrieving data. You have so many attempts before the drive is totally locked down.

Quote

 

Anti-hammering
When a TPM processes a command, it does so in a protected environment. For example a dedicated micro controller on a discrete chip, or a special hardware-protected mode on the main CPU. A TPM is used to create a cryptographic key that isn't disclosed outside the TPM. It's used in the TPM after the correct authorization value is provided.

TPMs have anti-hammering protection that is designed to prevent brute force attacks, or more complex dictionary attacks, that attempt to determine authorization values for using a key. The basic approach is for the TPM to allow only a limited number of authorization failures before it prevents more attempts to use keys and locks. Providing a failure count for individual keys isn't technically practical, so TPMs have a global lockout when too many authorization failures occur.

Because many entities can use the TPM, a single authorization success can't reset the TPM's anti-hammering protection. This prevents an attacker from creating a key with a known authorization value and then using it to reset the TPM's protection. TPMs are designed to forget about authorization failures after a period of time so the TPM doesn't enter a lockout state unnecessarily. A TPM owner password can be used to reset the TPM's lockout logic.

 

Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-security/tpm/tpm-fundamentals#tpm20-anti-hammering

So does anyone want to buy a brick? 😔😢

Edited Monday at 12:10 PM by Tpaktop2_1 NA

[Wolfswetpaws]

21 minutes ago, Tpaktop2_1 NA said:

So does anyone want to buy a brick? 😔😢

I won't pretend to fully understand what BitLocker is doing.

Some thoughts come to mind, but they may not work.
1.  Buy a new hard-drive.
2.  Remove the original Laptop hard-drive and install it into a portable hard-drive case.
3.  Install the new hard-drive into the Laptop.
4.  Install Windows into the new hard-drive.
5.  Attempt to access the data on the old hard-drive via a USB cable to the portable hard-drive case.

Given the possible expenses involved? 
The choice of spending more money, to recover the precious memories from the system, belongs to your wife, I reckon.

Thanks for spreading the news about BitLocker.
My Laptop uses Windows-10.  This BitLocker feature seems to be part of Windows-11?

[Efros]

oops

 

Edited Monday at 01:56 PM by Efros

[Tpaktop2_1 NA]

1 hour ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

I won't pretend to fully understand what BitLocker is doing.

Some thoughts come to mind, but they may not work.
1.  Buy a new hard-drive.
2.  Remove the original Laptop hard-drive and install it into a portable hard-drive case.
3.  Install the new hard-drive into the Laptop.
4.  Install Windows into the new hard-drive.
5.  Attempt to access the data on the old hard-drive via a USB cable to the portable hard-drive case.

Given the possible expenses involved? 
The choice of spending more money, to recover the precious memories from the system, belongs to your wife, I reckon.

Thanks for spreading the news about BitLocker.
My Laptop uses Windows-10.  This BitLocker feature seems to be part of Windows-11?

I have a 2TB m.2 SSD in my possession. What is  at odds is recovering 20 years worth of photos and documents.

2 minutes ago, Efros said:

oops

 

An understatement for the situation

[Wolfswetpaws]

1 minute ago, Tpaktop2_1 NA said:

I have a 2TB m.2 SSD in my possession. What is  at odds is recovering 20 years worth of photos and documents.

 

Only other thing I can think of is to contact a company that specializes in recovering hard-drives.
They may have the expertise and the tools?