linuxmemes

They also do spyware. They just renamed it "AI."

Holy shit, they automatically activate it on computers without an account to back the key up to?

That's just malicious

Windows is the virus.

Bit late to this thread but I know a few commands that might help if you're stuck:

manage-bde -off C: (or any other drive) This decrypts the volume and turns off bitlocker

manage-bde -lock/unlock

manage-bde -protectors -get C: (or any other drive) This displays your 48-digit key. I suggest you store it somewhere, just to be safe.

Get-BitlockerVolume reveals which of your partitions are encrypted with Bitlocker.

Disclaimer: I am not a terminal nerd, I just had similar problems years ago and went down the rabbit hole, used these commands and turned off bitlocker permanently. I don't use windows anymore, but when I did, it didn't cause any problems with bitlocker after this. If you're concerned about your un-encrypted hard drives, consider using Veracrypt (carefully!) or similar open source encryption software.

They desperately wanted to eliminate personal computers and replace them with dumb terminals running over the net.

When the public rejected this idea

THIS is their response. They are still insisting on total control of our computers.

Just checked my wife's laptop. Local account, secure boot off, windows 10. It had a message telling me to setup a microsoft account to 'finish encrypting the device'. I clicked turn off, and it's currently decrypting the hard drive. Blech.

Fuck Microsoft.

I remember back in highschool a buddy encrypted his harddrive, didn't backup his key. He Lost ALOT when I upgraded his comp

Meanwhile in Linux with luls, which I've had since a pre-pre-pre version somewhere back in the early 2000's, I can have multiple keys, all works like sunshine, never had problems.

On windows... So we work with highly sensitive data, and ever since I came in I thought it insane that people working remote don't have that highly sensitive data encrypted. We can't switch Linux yet, so okay, we go for BitLocker.

Boy oh boy oh boy was that a mistake.

50 remote users, 5 get encrypted devices with BitLocker as a trial and within a month, 3 of them already got locked up permanently because apparently it'll pwrma lock itself after x amounts of invalid passwords which is just incredibly stupid. But don't worry, there is a backup key! Yeah, that is lie 48 characters that we'd had to pass by phone and they have to type it flawlessly.

Suffice to say, the remote users will be running Linux soon, like it or not.

This happened to me once and I had to redo my coursework over the weekend...now I use Fedora :D

Not that it helps now, but you can also dump your bitlocker recovery key through powershell and save it independently.

(Get-BitLockerVolume -MountPoint "C").KeyProtector

I just leave secure boot/bitlocker off when it comes to my home system. It wasnt something I "needed" when I was dual booting windows 10 and it's not something I'm gonna enable now that I'm using 11.

I just installed Manjaro on my daily driver over the weekend. My entire steam library just works. My dev tools all work(better) on Linux, and free office is nice and familiar. Fuck widows.

I've actually had this occur before to a machine I specifically disabled the tpm on so that it wouldn't happen (it was an account less frozen kiosk). I was fuming the entire time I spent rebuilding it.

This has been happening to people randomly for years. Ysed to get calls about it all the time, and that was pre-covid

Always have backups! Doesnt matter what OS you use, stuff will break eventually.

I prefer bootable full system images to my NAS for easy restores, and online file backups, both running daily.

I mean you can write your Bitlocker key down and store it safely or put it somewhere else safe.. Lol

I can't even adjust bitlocker settings on my laptop's windows 11 home Installation...

Regarding your last sentence, something similar happened to me with OneDrive. I mocked people thinking surely they enabled something by mistake. Nope. The defaults and general behavior are just that wacky. Glad I'm off Microsoft now.

I've been preaching about this for a while. Many modern systems are getting bitlocker turned on by default.

If your system gets messed up, or simply won't start because of some security vendors bad update, goodbye data. You need the recovery key, and if you don't have it, you'll never see your bits the the correct order again.