Tag: recovery

Recovering from a BitLocker System Lockout after a BIOS Update

by Samuel Mitchell, posted in Microsoft, Security, windows

We had a user who was not abiding by the rules to store all the company data on the network drives to ensure it is protected and backed up by our systems.

The user’s laptop got a BIOS upgrade and unfortunately the laptop was rebooting requesting Bitlocker password. In our environment, Bitlocker passwords are registered in Active Directory upon activation but for some reason unknown to us, it was not there for this particular laptop.

Our colleague at the site, research a way to overcome this challenge and found the following solution:

  1. Download an Application that will allow you to build a bootable USB drive in DOS 32-bit. E.g. RUFUS
  2. Execute your selected application to build bootable USB drive (You might have to first format USB drive at 32-bit).
  3. Download all BIOS updates for the computer model from the vendor support site. (If you remember the previously installed BIOS version, you can download that version from the site)
  4. Boot up the computer with the bootable USB drive and run each BIOS from the command prompt (At this point, you are trying to find the BIOS version before the update was done, if you already know the version just install it).
  5. After updating the BIOS, reboot the computer to verify if Windows boots up successfully.
  6. If unsuccessful, go back to Step 4 and execute the next BIOS version file.
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    NOTE: Execute your BIOS from the latest to the oldest.