How to Recover Data Protected by BitLocker

When you use BitLocker, the encrypted volumes will be locked if the encryption key is not available, causing BitLocker to enter recovery mode. Likely causes for the encryption key's unavailability include:

• Modification of one of the boot files.
• The BIOS is modified and the TPM is disabled.
• The TPM is cleared.
• An attempt is made to boot without the TPM, PIN, or USB key being available.
• The BitLocker-encrypted disk is moved to a new computer.

After the drive is locked, you can boot only to recovery mode. In recovery mode, you enter the recovery password using the function keys on your keyboard (just as you do when entering the PIN), pressing F1 for the digit 1, F2 for the digit 2, and so forth, with F10 being the digit 0. You must use function keys because localized keyboard support is not yet available at this phase of startup.

If you have the recovery key on a USB flash drive, you can insert the recovery key and press Esc to restart the computer. The recovery key will be read automatically during startup.

If you cancel recovery, the Windows Boot Manager will provide instructions for using Startup Repair to fix a startup problem automatically. Do not follow these instructions because Startup Repair cannot access the encrypted volume. Instead, restart the computer and enter the recovery key.

More Info A dditionally, you can use the BitLocker Repair Tool, Repair-bde.exe, to help recover data from an encrypted volume. If a BitLocker failure prevents Windows 7 from starting, you can run repair-bde from the Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) command prompt. For more information about repair-bde, run repair-bde /? at a command prompt.