Today I delivered a Dell Windows 11 laptop to a customer at their location. They were using it for a financial analysis audit. The laptop lid was closed when they went to lunch and when they came back the problem started. It said Windows was low on the battery and then it shut off. They tried starting the laptop and immediately it went into recovery mode. They tried the different options under advanced mode and panicked when the C: drive was missing in all the options.
The laptop was brought it to me and they asked me to repair it. I tried the Windows recovery menu and the first obstacle was getting past the encrypted C: drive. My client didn’t realize the c: drive had Bit Locker enabled so it can’t be accessed unless the key is entered. I’m discovering every Windows 11 computer has Bitlocker enabled on the main drive by default. So I had to find the key through my client’s Microsoft account to move ahead in the project and It’s around 25 characters long, Nothing worked in the recovery menu – most choices reverted back to the menu with no error messages. I could access command prompt but I couldn’t do anything productive with it. I wanted to copy files to thumb drive but couldn’t access it through a drive letter for the thumb drive
Different boot thumb drives like Sergei Strauss and Linux mint and still couldn’t get to to see anything on the encrypted drive. Next, the drive was removed from the laptop and placed in a drive reader and connected to my Linux desktop computer. Part of the drive could be read after entering the recovery key. Most of the user data was under the Onedrive folder and it couldn’t be opened because of a link error! Many things were tried and one was a drive check and then repair in the Disks utility. No errors were reported that I remember and the drive was put back in the laptop.
To my amazement, Windows 11 started and the desktop appeared and I could log right into the account! Everything seemed fine and the next day it was delivered to my clients location. Sometimes, Linux can repair Windows systems!