Back in January Microsoft encrypted all my hard drives without saying anything. I was playing around with a dual boot yesterday and somehow aggravated Secureboot. So my C: panicked and required a 40 character key to unlock.

Your key is backed up to the Microsoft account associated with your install. Which is considerate to the hackers. (and saved me from a re-install) But if you’ve got an unactivated copy, local account, or don’t know your M$ account credentials, your boned.

Control Panel > System Security > Bitlocker Encryption.

BTW, I was aware that M$ was doing this and even made fun of the effected users. Karma.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    5 hours ago

    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.

  • HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 hours ago

    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

  • Asswardbackaddict@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    I got into coding in the last few days. I have a project. Bumping into this while I’m trying to learn this shit? Fuck me. You know, we could just stop using money

  • DicJacobus@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    When I switched to a new CPU I got a bit locker message and it was one of my biggest computer scares ever. I couldn’t remember if the shop that assembled my pc would have enabled it or not. And wasn’t available to contact.

    I had to take a risk. If I continued there was a 50 50 chance my shit would have been bricked. Thankfully. That shop had the foresight to NOT randomly enable features the client didn’t ask for

  • carrion0409@lemm.ee
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    14 hours ago

    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.

    • thomasloven@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      It’s not ”leaving bitlocker off”, though. It’s ”be aware about it and turn bitlocker off manually” since it’s enabled by default in the latest updates.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      13 hours ago

      I tried having it on my new laptop for a bit. It took like a week for Windows to kill the secure boot key for my Linux partition. Even after I disabled secure boot I couldn’t get it to boot up so I had to reinstall. Just left it turned off afterwards.

  • Mustakrakish@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

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

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    16 hours ago

    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.

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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    16 hours ago

    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.

  • randomname@sh.itjust.works
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    16 hours ago

    they’ve been doing this for a long time. the issue you are having is the reason I keep bitlocker disabled on my desktop. on devices that can be stolen I still use it.

  • sbird@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

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

      • RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        Disabling it entirely is possible, but I want to keep the encryption and set a proper password for it instead of the stupidly long recovery key. That and similar features seem to be locked behind the pro version.

      • Vahenir@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        They do and it auto activates when you add a Microsoft account. It cannot be turned off on the home edition as it doesn’t have the full bitlocker settings. Came across this one on some machine i was working on a while ago and i ended up having to pull the SSD from the customers machine and plug it into something with pro to actually disable bitlocker.

  • spicehoarder@lemm.ee
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    24 hours ago

    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.