Will Bitleaker work in a situation involving a hardware change?

[arabenis82]

I've just had the pleasure of experiencing Bitlocker for the first time 😫🔐 Adding me to that very long and ever-growing list of 'satisfied' customers...

It's the same old story: I had never heard of Bitlocker until after I had been locked out of my own machine. This being a Lenovo Thinkpad P1 Gen 5 i9-12900H with dTPM 2.0, running Windows 11 Pro x64.

I did not know that Bitlocker was already engaged on my OS drive C: by default, I never turned this thing on in the first place.

Now it's a big problem because my laptop suddenly died and the motherboard had to be replaced.

Following the repair, the Bitlocker recovery has been triggered and I don't have the key - it's not in my MS account which is an absolutely ridiculous situation - especially since I didn't even set this up in the first place - it was switched on by default 🤯

After spending the week doing a crash course in Bitlocker and really learning the detail thanks to kkamagui I now understand that because there is a new dTPM module inside the machine, it has caused a mis-match.

So the question is, will Bitleaker work in this situation?

The Lenovo BIOS version is N3JET45W (1.29) installed in October 2025, about a month before total failure of the machine.

Any help or advice would be gratefully appreciated.

Many thanks,

Alex

[PaulNevada]

I think you're wrong - no way the key isn't in your MS Account...

[arabenis82]

I think you're wrong - no way the key isn't in your MS Account...

Thanks for your reply.

Well I've logged into my MS account several times, gone into the registered device details and drilled down into Manage Recovery Keys and it's always the same thing: "You don't have any Bitlocker recovery keys uploaded to your Microsoft account."

I've been going over it time and time again and for the life of me, I cannot remember ever dealing with the Bitlocker function at any point, let alone turning it off - it was surely switched on by default and I cannot see any keys in my account.

[PaulNevada]

Don't you mess up with the several accounts here?

[arabenis82]

Don't you mess up with the several accounts here?

I just have the one MS account onto which the device itself is registered?