BitLocker Key Question

Harley51 said:

I upgraded my mother board to a Asus Rog Strix Z690-A Gaming WiFi D4. Bitlocker is turned off. (Has never been turned on). How to I get the bitlocker key. It's not on my Microsoft Account. Does it have to be turned on to record the Bitlocker key?

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hsehestedt said:

The key will be generated when you enable BitLocker on a drive. The wizard will then guide you through saving a copy of the BL key. It will give you an option to print the key, save it to a file, or save it to the cloud.

At any time thereafter you can again retrieve the key by right-clicking the drive and choosing the option to manage BitLocker.

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cereberus said:

I started saving to onedrive, as I could rename the text file to something more meaningful i.e.

from

BitLocker Recovery Key 9C19080D-14DE-4555-B0F6-C56D0F87FDC2.txt

to

BRK 9C19080D-D Drive 16-04-22.txt


Problem saving to MSA is that you get multiple keys as you create them and hard to work out which ones are latest (as it does not give drive letter) if you have bitlocked drives on different dates, so you can delete ones you no longer need.

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hsehestedt said:

I agree. It gets to be a little bit of a pain to manage them.

However, do note that if Windows needs to ask you for a BitLocker key it will show you a unique identifier for the disk. When you save the BitLocker key, not only does it save the key, but the unique identifier will be saved in the file with the key, and, just to take it a step further, the file name you save contains the unique identifier in the file name.

So, while it is not strictly necessary to associate a drive letter with the BitLocker key, I still like to put it all in a single file. I'll list stuff out like this:

Recovery key for OS drive on System1: <Recovery Key>
Recovery key for External Seagate Software Collection Disk: <Recovery Key>
etc.

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cereberus said:

Yeah I am aware of the unique id but the way MS Stores it is just a list. You cannot at first glance say - that is the D drive. You have to go to access drive, do not put in password, select forgotten password, then it tells you the uid.

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hsehestedt said:

Understood. I was agreeing with you. It gets confusing with those long strings of digits.

It's also a royal pain in the backside when you have to type that long key multiple times. Just last week I had an issue that I posted about here, where during the installation of the April Patch Tuesday updates one of my machines got into a repeated blue screen boot loop. Every time I tried a recovery step, I had to enter that blasted long key. Got real annoying real fast .

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cereberus said:

I just cut and paste it from text file.

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Haydon said:

I think he couldn't open a text file while he was trying to recover from BSOD.

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