ACER WITH WINDOWS 11 STARTED ASKING FOR A BITLOCKER KEY RIGHT AFTER REMOVING THE RAM

[mnciks11]

Hello everyone

I am faced with a weird problem, a client came in the office to upgrade the ram on his acer aspire 3 A315 11th Gen, the ram was upgraded perfectly fine, then after that the machine keeps looping on the bitlocker key, it can not pass that screen of bitlocker, went to bios to change secure boot policy but still the same, tried everything guys that i can think of, still doing the same thing, client does not have the microsoft account for recovery, so here i need your brains...I programmed the bios with a virgin file with no serial number still asking for the bitlocker key...

Guys please i need your advice on this, and the machine was working perfectly fine with no issues, this is very weird, i was gonna leave the bios below with the serial number but i can not, its not allowed here... i love and respect this forum..

[SMDFlea]

put the original bios and ram back. This still might not fix it but its worth a try.

[mnciks11]

put the original bios and ram back. This still might not fix it but its worth a try.

Thank you so much brother, just did that now. Wait what i clean the original bios...mmmmm

[rogfanther]

Just as a possibility, did *you* see the machine working perfectly before, or that is only what the client said ? Maybe he had already done something to activate bitlocker, and forgot to mention it to you ....

[reformatt]

I have seen this a few times on some machines that come in for repair. Usually it's Windows complaining that something changed re Secure Boot (even if it is still on). I'm thinking it's some kind of BIOS change (be it CMOS reset, RAM change etc) that is considered tampering and you need to put in your BL recovery key to continue. First and foremost, I just want to get the machine fixed first, and worry about BL afterwards. So in that instance, I put their SSD to one side, and put in my own SSD with Windows 10 on it to boot and check hardware etc.

Since I'm not installing Windows 10 (it just picks up new hardware and boots), there is no change in BL policy even if the machine supports modern standby (which is a trigger to auto enable it during installation). In other words, the BL encryption key in the TPM won't be altered by putting this drive in. Now I've had this a few times, where I go to put back the original SSD and it boots straight into Windows without asking for the recovery key. I don't know enough about the chain of trust process that goes on for Bitlocker, but my assumption is that whatever it's complaining about is fixed by a clean boot to my spare SSD. Anyway, it's worth a try when you don't have an alternative other than wiping the drive.

I dump the key straight away if I do get in with:

manage-bde -protectors C: -get

You can redirect it to a text file and save to a USB....

manage-bde -protectors C: -get > D:\BitlockerRecoveryKey.txt

[mcplslg123]

Thanks reformatt for those dos commands for bitlocker. Wasnt aware of them. Learnt something new(atleast for me) from you.