BitLocker activated after disk swap

[IT_rccab]

Our organisation has several HGP 250 G8 notebooks. A while ago (after the warranty period), one would randomly refuse to boot saying that no disk could be found. After several power of/on sequences it would eventually boot (or I would run out of patience).

Recently I took the laptop to a local PC repairer and it presented the problem at the first power up. He re-seated the drive and the device booted. After several successful reboots we thought the problem had been resolved. However, when I got it home the error message reappeared.

I took it back to the repairer along with another of the same model with a view to swapping the disk drive to see if the problem moved. On powering up the second device (with the disk of the first) a "BitLocker Recovery" blue screen appeared. BitLocker had not been configured on either device, so I was unable to execute any of the recovery processes.

After several reboots the "no disk" error came back again, so I am assuming that the error was not with the disk itself. Several articles suggest making changes to the BIOS to circumvent the BitLocker message, but I am reluctant to do anything. I am inclined to have the disks swapped back and for the repairer to investigate other causes of the original issue, in which case I hope that the BitLocker message disappears from the "good" device.

I would appreciate any suggestions on how to overcome the BitLocker issue for my specific laptops. In addition, any suggestions for the possible cause of the original intermittent issue of not finding a boot device.