Hi all.. first i would like to say great forum. have solved a few problmes by reading these forums. Alas i need help which i havent been able to solve yet. Quick info : Installed a beta version of win 7 a while ago. laptop from dell. i encrypted an external USB drive. choose a password to unlock it and everything worked ok. After a while i got fed up of tying the password every time so enabled " always unlock on this computer" option. still alls well. The drive contained a lot of family pictures and after i bought a stora nas HD i connected the USB drive to my main PC to transfer them to the nas ( running XP64 bit on main pc). this wasn't a good idea as i found i couldn't transfer whole directories at a time. So i re-connceted the USB drive to my dell laptop ( still running win 7 beta) and attempted to tranfer from here. Of course the beta version had the BSoD bug when copying to shared media. so i bite the bullet and upgraded. Now for the dilemma.. After installing win 7. and plugging the USB drive in, it says its locked. and when i try to unlock it its only asking for the recovery key. i was assuming it would ask me to the password. ok time to panic as my recovery file was on the laptop, which is now overwritten with win 7. I tried a undelete but to no avail. I remember the password. just not the key. So my question is... is it possible to activate the enter password option for my USB drive ?? or have i any other options ??? looking forward to some positive feed back ... 50 gb of familly pictures from the past 3 years are at risk.. Kind regards /kris

Sounds like your original key is gone, and if so... there is no way to get a "clear key". Before upgrading it may have been possible to extract information from the damaged drive, but I cannot see any way of doing it now.If you backed up the key, then there is some hope.See: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424308(WS.10).aspxUnfortunately, keeping the key and password on the original O/S or a drive on your computer is the least favorable use of bitlocker because of this problem.

If you did a straight upgrade and didn't format, it may be possible to try the repair tool. You may wish to seek help from an expert using thishttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee523219(WS.10).aspx

Hi,Can the encrypted USB drive be read on another system? If so, please copy all data on another drive and format it. After formatting the device, the Bitlocker will be turned off automatically. Meanwhile, you can also try to enter the key on another Windows 7 for a test.However, if the drive cannot be read on each machine, I'm afraid that the data on the encrypted drive may be gone and it's hard to retrieve.Thanks,Novak

Hi, I have a problem, my hd key recovery requests to turn off Bitlocker. I lost the key and I need to unlock my hd, what to do?amp746@hotmail.comBrazil