How Can I Access My External Drive If BitLocker Won’t Let Me Through?
Get free technical support from Senior Technology Editor at Lifehacker
Do you have technical issues that are keeping you awake at night? We’d love to answer it in a future Tech 911 column! Describe your problem in an email to [email protected] and make sure you include “Tech 911” in the subject line.
Encryption is a wonderful thing. While I don’t use Whole Drive Encryption on my Windows desktop at home – courtesy of BitLocker – that’s only because I’m the only one who’s ever used my system, and I don’t actually store anything of value in it. (All my personal documents and anything I would otherwise encrypt live on the NAS server, which is normally off.)
I do this partly because I’m lazy, partly because I need the maximum performance from my PC, and partly because I’m afraid of the day the encryption will fail – or I’m absent-minded about everything I need to do if or when I will need to reinstall Windows 10 – and I can’t access my data.
John, a reader of Lifehacker, is all too familiar with this situation. As he writes for Tech 911 Q&A this week:
“I have a Western Digital external hard drive and the folder on the hard drive is encrypted with Windows Bitlocker. I forgot I did this, reinstalled windows and can no longer access the files. Is there a way to fix this? “
You wrote down the recovery key, right?
This is exactly the scenario that I don’t want to deal with, so I prefer not to use Bitlocker. I’ll stick with something like VeraCrypt , just so my operating system isn’t tied to the encryption process. That is, and I only need to remember one giant password, which I can save in a password manager, write and tape it under my desk, or save it with any other anti-spyware method you can think of.
You should have been prompted to save your BitLocker recovery key when you enabled encryption on your external drive. If you cannot remember how you did it, or have no idea where this key was hidden, this is the main problem with which we will be dealing.
Unlocking an encrypted drive is very easy . In theory, all you have to do is launch File Explorer, right-click the drive, and unlock it. You will be prompted for the password or PIN that you set when BitLocker was initialized, and that’s it.
If you don’t know the password or PIN that you used to set up BitLocker, you need a recovery key. Essentially, this is your digital lifebuoy. If you don’t have it, you are sunk. This is the nature of encryption. There would be an easy way to get around this and get access to your files, well, what’s the point of encrypting the drive then? Anyone with physical or remote access to your system can back up your data after a few minutes of work, completely nullifying the recovery key point to begin with.
That said, you have one lifeline, even if all this talk about recovery key isn’t shaking your memory. You may have saved the specified key to your Microsoft account when setting up BitLocker encryption. If so, you should be able to find it at this link . Microsoft’s key archive is pretty extensive, if you’ve ever saved it to your account. I just looked through the link and found my old desktop keys.
If it is not there, and you have no other memory of where you could have stored the specified key, consider that your data is gone. Well, technically it ‘s still there, you just don’t have a way to access it. And no, there are no workarounds you can use or brute force methods you can try to regain access. As the developers of the popular M3 Data Recovery tool describe :
“As we know, BitLocker is a drive-level encryption solution. Therefore, if you forget your BitLocker password and lose your BitLocker recovery key, data recovery software (including M3 BitLocker Recovery) will not crack or crack your BitLocker-encrypted drive. This is both a political issue and a technological limitation. “
Hope this link helps you. Otherwise, you may need to go through the generic passwords that you prefer to see if you used one of them when configuring the BitLocker drive. Beyond that, it’s a valuable reminder that even external drives should be backed up somewhere – ideally – an unencrypted location that you protect with physical access, or even some cloud storage provider that can handle the encryption on its own. …