Use BitLocker Repair Tool to Recover Encrypted Drive in Windows  

avismile10 said:

Hi @Brink Any specific reason why not to use the destination\recover.img in the commands?

I've never used it to say. I've always just used a spare drive.

Dave2 said:

Thanks Shawn for a great post.

I have a Dell XPS 9560 with Bitlocker encrypted system drive. Recently Windows 10 displayed a notification (coloured red instead of the usual blue) indicating some kind of storage related error (I didn't note the exact text unfortunately). Shortly after when trying to launch MS Word I received an error "The operating system is not presently configured to run this application". So I closed everything and rebooted.

On reboot, after entering the Bitlocker PIN as usual, the PIN is accepted but then the system hangs showing a black screen containing Dell logo and 'spinning dots' infinitely. I can enter recovery mode via F12 boot menu so as to unlock using the recovery key, which is accepted, but it still hangs unlocking. Same occurs after making a bootable USB drive, booting to the custom install screen and opening a command prompt and then performing a manage-bde -unlock C: -RecoveryPassword <my recovery key>.

So I've reached the point of assuming there's a problem with the Bitlocker metadata, and found your article. Again booting from the USB and opening the command prompt I attempted to repair as per your post.

My broken Bitlocker drive is C: and my external 1TB USB to recover to is H:. I had trouble with repair-bde complaining that H: was in use even after using -Force, so I formatted it and ran repair-bde again. It seemed to do the trick, but my problem is the repair-bde command appears to have hung after indicating it's finished the decryption, and telling me of the action required to run the chkdsk. Note in the screenshot at Screenshot.jpg - Google Drive, the cursor is flashing, and the window hasn't returned to the command prompt. It took maybe a couple of hours to recover the data (C: was a 500GB SSD), but the command has still not completed after about another 5 hours. Additionally there is a repeating pattern of disk activity indicated by the LED on the external USB. Should I wait? Should I hit <cntrl-C> and then run the chkdsk?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

David.

Hello David, and welcome to Ten Forums.

I would go ahead and run chkdsk to be safe.

Dave2 said:

Thanks Shawn. As it turned out the session hung because the external drive suffered a failure during the recovery. I had to hard reboot the machine. When connecting the USB drive to which I recovered to any other PC it would just hang, with the drive showing the same repeating pattern on it's LED. I ended up destroying the external drive & binning it, and just rebuilt my XPS from scratch, restoring data from backups. I have an system image backup as well now. :)

Cheers,

David.

I was afraid it was going to be hard drive failure as the cause.

Darkane said:

hello Brink and everyone
i tried option 2 with the recovery key and it completed without errors
but the chkdsk command bringed up the following error
The type of the file system is NTFS.
The first NTFS boot sector is unreadable or corrupt.
Reading second NTFS boot sector instead.
Unable to determine volume version and state. CHKDSK aborted.

any help is highly appreciated

Hello Darkane,

Are you able to boot into Windows, or get the data off the drive on another computer?

Darkane said:

yes totally
my issue is with parition D actually not C

If you're unable to access the D partition, you could see if this below may help.

Repair NTFS Boot Sector: The First NTFS Boot Sector is Unreadable or Corrupt - Info | Remo Software