linuxmemes

This was the exact same situation I experienced with my old Surface 6. Started to look into Linux firmware on Surface devices and deactivated secure boot because it wouldn't boot Ventoy at all and do nothing, so I figured to try again with no secure boot. It still didn't work so I turned it on again, but was then greeted with this Bitlocker screen which I didn't even know it had activated up until this point. I set up a local account so I had no key to reset or something and was literally not able to do anything besides reinstalling the entire system.

Luckily I had nothing important on it lol

Weirdly the activation was saved on the MS servers so I didn't need to do that again at least (was a preinstalled system so I wouldn't have known the activation key anyways, I thought "When it doesn't work I'll switch to Linux fully because I'm not paying for that garbage system").

After I updated Ventoy I was able to boot again even with secure boot on, there seems to have been an issue with that specific version.

I had Windows on my device since I bought it (around 2018) only upgraded to W11. It never mentioned anything about Bitlocker before this incident so if I had important stuff on it it would have been so over. Well, never save important files on Windows without backup is what I got out of it

This caused me literally bigger problems than my switch to Arch Linux after having only used Windows the entire time xD

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.

Holy shit. This happened to me last week.

Turned off Safe Boot when going back over to Win on a dualboot after 6 months. Wanted to avoid updates nuking my dualboot option. (Edit: As was a Win issue 6 months ago)

...enter Bitlocker recovery for Every. Single. Logon.

Just need to do one thing that needs genuine Win11 fingerprint and then I'm doing a 22.1 fresh install.

Upvote for a acknowledging karma

Windows is still around?????

Thank you for the word of warning. Does this affect Windows 10 as well?

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

That's just malicious

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

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