asking for bitlocker key

[Aud10]

I was having difficulties connecting to our HP Colour Laserjet printer MFPM477 Printer, downloaded a driver from HP and after restarting cannot get access to my computer asking for a Bitlocker recovery key which we do not have, checked our Microsoft account and one is not setup.  Need assistance as cannot now use our main computer

[resistencia]

Hi @Aud10 

follow the steps to find the key from this link, if you don't find the key unfortunately you will have to reinstall windows

HP PCs - Using BitLocker and finding the recovery key (Windows 11, 10) | HP® Support

[DGroves]

also note that the latest builds of windows 11 24h2 (and newer)

will auto enable bitlocker during the OS install

or updating from a earlier builds

unlike older pre 23H4 builds that had it disabled by default

this means that you can no longer move a drive between systems

unless you also know the bitlocker key or you disable bitlocker on the drive before moving it to another system

[resistencia]

Hi @DGroves 

I have that version of windows and I never activated the BitLocker, when I bought my laptop 3 years ago I had BitLocker active and no update of windows has activated the BitLocker.

[DGroves]

if bit locker is enabled and you were using a Microsoft User Account then the bitlocker key is auto-magickly generated and linked to the MS user account that was used to install windows

if you created a "local user account" then it was up to you to record the bitlocker key when prompted by the system 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/find-your-bitlocker-recovery-key-6b71ad27-0b89-ea08-f143...

it appears that you might not be able to recover your key, if so the only recourse is to wipe/format the drive and reinstall the OS and/or Operating System