My computer asked for a Bitlocker Recovery key
Bitlocker is an encryption feature which is included with the windows version starting from Vistas I suppose. It is designed to protect the data we have in our PC.
The corona Virus Pandemic is going on. Most of us are working from home these days. Its has been 100 days now, I haven’t been to the office premises. I was using my Laptop which was provided by my Office. It was a Dell Latitude 7490. I was on meeting with my colleagues most of the time.
Read about how I feel about in this pandemic situation in this post:
That day, I was on a Webex call since morning 9:45 am. We were working on a data science project. It was now 1:30 pm in afternoon, I realized that I was logged out of my Outlook account. As I was working from home these days, I assumed it to be another session time out. I tried to log in to my Outlook account. I logged in, and was logged out automatically within seconds. I was cursing my Internet connection again. After trying several times, I was not able to log in to my outlook anymore. Other than that everything was working fine for me in my Laptop.
I made a master plan to “Restart my laptop”. I thought it will resolve the issue. And obviously that’s the best thing an engineer can to to solve a problem. “RESTART” !!!
As soon as I restarted my laptop, I wasn’t able to start it anymore. The laptop when opened now shows a BIG BLUE screen, saying an information about Bitlocker. I realized, I am in trouble. The screen was asking a Bitlocker key which I don’t know where to generate from.
I called up my IT support team and explained the issue to them. They told me not to worry as the problem was due to the TPM chip in the motherboard. So it was basically a hardware issue.
TPM stands for “Trusted Platform Module”. It’s a chip that enables motherboard tamper-resistant full-disk encryption without requiring extremely long passphrases.
They told me to share my login id and they generated a 48 digit Bitlocker recovery key for me. They asked me to use it to login to my computer. I logged in finally!!! Everything was running fine except the Outlook again. They asked me to refresh my TPM management.
Control panel> Bitlocker disk management> Tpm management> refresh
I did the steps and was happy that my problems are over now. I restarted my machine. I was wrong!!! My problems aren’t over. The system was again asking for the Bitlocker key to login. I told them about it. They said they will assign my ticket to the Bitlocker team. Well to my surprise, the person whom the ticket was assigned happened to be one of my close person from the office. I called him up directly and discussed the problem.
He then removed Bitlocker from my machine for the time-being. As now, I don’t have Bitlocker in my system, I can now login into my PC without the 48 digit key. He told me to send him my address as he would report anyone from DELL so that my laptop gets the required hardware changed.
He also asked me to take care if the person from DELL seems infected with Corona virus. He said its a company policy:
‘ HEALTH THEN WORK !!!’
