How to Unlock Bitlocker Without Recovery Key in Windows 10

4 Solutions to Unlock BitLocker Drive When Forgot Password

I have been locked my USB flash drive with a BitLocker password. Unfortunately I did it encrypted in my Windows 10 laptop and now I am unable to open it because I forgot the password. Is there any way to unlock the BitLocker drive without password?

According to the situation, we will analyze four cases as well as the specific steps for the users to unlock the BitLocker drive when they forgot the BitLocker password. As a matter of fact, it depends on whether the user has the recovery key or not.

Part 1: Unlock the BitLocker Drive with recovery key file

Solution 1: Manually unlock the BitLocker drive on Windows

It would be much easier if you make a backup of the recovery key in your Windows laptop or the cloud platform. Plug in the USB flash drive to the Windows laptop and right-click to Unlock Drive. When it asks you enter the password, you should click More options to get the recovery key entrance. Click it and enter the 48-digit recovery key. If you do not know how to find the recovery key, refer to 4 Options to Find the BitLocker Recovery Key.

Solution 2: Open BitLocker drive on Mac with recovery key file

If you only have the Mac laptop on hand for a project developing, it will be a challenging task for you to open BitLocker drive on Mac even if you do not forget the password. However, everything will be different if you find iSunshare BitLocker Genius.

This software is developed for Mac users to open BitLocker encrypted drives and reach the files on the drive as easy as in Windows. You can finish the decryption in several steps:

Step 1: Open BitLocker Genius and plug into your drive. Select your drive and click the Unlock button.

Step 2: In order to mount the BitLocker drive, you need to import the recovery key file by clicking the Open button. Then execute the Mount button

Step 3:The drive is unlocked and you can deal with it as you are in Windows.

Part 2: Unlock the BitLocker drive without password and recovery key

In fact, if you lost both the password and recovery key. In principle, there is no way to open the BitLocker drive with no data loss. Therefore, you can make use of the full storage at the cost of your data: format the drive.

Solution 3: Format BitLocker drive on Windows

Start Command Prompt and choose "Run as administrator" and execute the commands one by one in the Command Prompt, then you can get the drive formatted:

dispart

list disk

select disk n

clean

create partition primary

format fs=ntfs

assign

Solution 4: Erase BitLocker USB on Mac

Firstly, you should access Disk Utility and find your BitLocker USB drive. Then, click on Erase option and choose MS-DOS (FAT) as the format of your USB disk. Lastly, click on the Erase button to format the drive.

For those who forgot the password and do not backup the recovery key before, they can choose the brute-force tool if they do not want to format the disk. But, it will take very long and won't work 100%.

Related Articles:

• How to Open & Read & Write BitLocker Encrypted Drive on Mac
• How to Read BitLocker Flash Drive on Mac
• How to Open BitLocker Encrypted USB Flash Drives on Mac
• Password Protect Outlook Email Folder with BitLocker

How to Unlock Bitlocker Without Recovery Key in Windows 10

Source: https://www.isunshare.com/computer/4-solutions-to-unlock-bitlocker-drive-when-forgot-password.html

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