16th October 2026
I’m starting to get more and more laptops with bitlocked drives as Windows 11 can turn it on by default. If the laptop main board is unrepairable and the drive is bitlocked then I need the recovery key to get the data from the drive. The problem is that more often than not the customer does not know that the drive is encrypted and worse, that the recovery key may not be stored anywhere. I’ve had some near misses and some complete data losses with this.
So please check if your drive is bitlocked and either turn it off ( https://www.elevenforum.com/…/turn-on-or-off-device…/ ) or backup the encryption key in case it’s needed ( https://www.elevenforum.com/…/backup-bitlocker…/ )