A few months ago I encrypted the whole hard drive on my Lenovo X1 Carbon 3rd Gen notebook. There are no partitions. I did not save the recovery key externally, if at all I saved it then it is on the encrypted drive itself.
Today my notebook crashed (whilst updating iTunes) and during restart I see the error message that Windows has a startup problem. It goes through the auto-repair procedure, which fails, and I'm taken to a screen which asks for my Bitlocker recovery key. I don't have that so I try the various advanced options like system repair, but none of the options that do not wipe my data seem to work because they need access to the encrypted drive.
1. Is there any way to unlock the drive, given that I know my Bitlocker password but not my Bitlocker recovery key? I am not able to actually get to any screen which asks for the password, every screen is asking for the recovery key.
I tried the command prompt option and entered 'manage-bde -unlock c: -password' which prompts for the password. I enter the password but get the response 'The password you entered failed to unlock the drive'. I'm sure it's the right password. Next I try to view the recovery key with 'manage-bde -protectors -get c: -type recoverykey' but the resulting data shows the key ID but not the actual numeric key value (it's just blank).
2. Can anything be done to unlock the drive via the command prompt, or any other route such as a boot disk?
3. Is it possible to generate the numeric recovery key elsewhere if the key ID and the password are known?
4. If I remove the hard drive from this laptop and attach it to another computer as a slave drive, is it possible to unlock it there using the Bitlocker password?
