Q&A for How to Recover BitLocker

Unfortunately, BitLocker uses industry-standard encryption, meaning that it is unlikely you will be able to recover the contents of that drive. If you forgot the recovery key, you will have to wipe the drive clean.

Use a keyboard to do this. If you do not have a keyboard but have a touchscreen, tap the keyboard button in the corner. Due to software limitations, most Windows recovery screens use the US English keyboard layout, so if you have a different keyboard layout, you should search online to see which keys map to which characters. For example, the "ñ" key maps to ";" and QWERTZ and AZERTY map to QWERTY.

You can search for a paper copy, or you can search for a USB drive you backed the recovery key up to. Unfortunately, if you do not have the recovery key, you will not be able to break the AES-128 or AES-256 bit encryption without the recovery key.

If you do not have a recovery key, then you will be unable to restore the contents of your hard drive. Encryption means that the only way to view your files is to have the decryption key, which you must enter into the Bitlocker Recovery screen. You will have to reinstall Windows.