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Secure boot - Bitlocker scary moment

AnotherRandomUs
Level 9

So, a few days ago right after my Zephyrus hung in a weird way in which I had to unplug it from mains and press the power key in the keyboard for a long time so it will revive, it did so showing me a message which I had only seen once.

Secure boot could not be completes and it was asking me for the Bitlocker recovery key to be able to boot. WTF.

So I went into the BIOS, another surprise, I had it password protected and it didn't ask for the password. WTF #2.

At that point I thought that somehow the CMOS memory had been wipe out, and it sure was, as any other custom settings had revert to default values.

I had previously seem a BIOS menu that let you restore -various kinds of- certificates. I hadn't messed with it, but seeing as the certificate count in each category was 0, I chose to execute the restore option. It seemed to work, I don't remember how many were loaded (like, 20-30 ¿?), so I thought one of them served as the decoding key for bitlocker and somehow I had dodged a bullet.

Proceed to save and reboot. Secure boot could not be completed. WTF #3!!!!.

At that point I thought I had lost everything that was on the (4Tb) drives, going back and forth with a few things that didn't resolve the problem.

Cutting to the end, I was able to log in from a friend's computer into my Microsoft account web, and THANKS TO GOD I was able to fetch the bitlocker recovery key, which then I input and made it able to boot to Windows.

PEOPLE, be sure to have your bitlocker keys at hand to avoid losing your data to stupidity!!! Search for microsoft bitlocker recovery key in google.

Which is ironic, I'm sure this is one protection measure than has caused more harm than good over the years.

Now I'm thinking on disabling bitlocker but I'm wary of the decryption process (my config have 2Tb drives in raid0, as if there weren't enough things that could go wrong already).

Any experience disabling bitlocker?

Also, the erase of the CMOS -or whatever other memory storage- seemed to have triggered by me holding the power button for a long long time (maybe 60 seconds ¿?), as the laptop wasn't booting up with every other thing I tried. Keep that in mind.

 

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