Help with Device Encryption and Moving SSD's

Hi everyone, I am stuck here and really need help. My HP Spectre charge ports broke, so I couldn't charge/turn on my laptop. I had device encryption enabled on Win 11 home and I have the recovery key saved in my MS account.

I have since moved the SSD into the second slot of another laptop. I was expecting to be asked to input the recovery key somewhere on the new laptop, but nothing popped up. It is disk 0 in the attached screenshot. I can only view the unencrypted contents which appear to be recovery files on the SSD, and not the contents I'm really after, which are found on the 952gb bitlocker encrypted partition.

I have since had my charge ports repaired on the HP spectre, however when I try to move the SSD back, I am getting boot errors and it's as if the old computer can't locate the partition, nor begin any kind of recovery process. I have tried disabling secure boot in the BIOS with no luck.

I am really just after the data, so I would like to either use the new laptop to unlock the old contents with the recovery key, or fix the boot errors on the old laptop.

Thank you sincerely,
Chris

I've not had an issue with moving the boot/system drive to a different slot/socket as long as the BIOS recognizes it. The Activation of the computer should not change due to change of the drive.

Thank you Berton. I am still at a loss. I have the ssd in the original computer now and it won't boot.

HP autorecovery repair fails. The log file doesn't exist, I have checked the indicated file path and there is nothing beyond D:/Recovery/WindowsRE



Selected boot image did not authenticate after turning secure boot back on:


Selecting OS boot manager doesn't work.


System cycles back to try auto repair and is basically stuck in an infinite loop.

You can disable the BitLocker protection and to decrypt a BitLocker encrypted drive in the Windows Recovery Environment.

At command prompt, type the following command to view the drive letter of the encrypted drive:


Then unlock the encrypted drive, by using the following command:

If you know the BitLocker recovery key, give this command:



If you know the BitLocker password to unlock the drive, give this command:



Then proceed to decrypt the drive and turn off the BitLocker protection with this command:



To check the decryption status, type again the following command and ensure that the drive is Fully Decrypted and Unlocked:


When you done, remove the Windows installation media and restart the computer.

It appears the volume is already unlocked but still encrypted. I will try the manage-bde -off drive-letter: command to decrypt the drive.




But the size of 90gb is throwing me off. Shouldn't it be 950gb?

I wanted to try to relock the drive before decrypting it to see if this would solve my boot issue. I received this error:

Decryption and bitlocker turned off on as per FreeBooter's advice, but the ssd still won't boot on the old HP spectre and my old data is still nowhere to be found.



Plugging in the ssd into the old laptop still only looks like it gives me access to the recovery partition.


Looking at Disc 0, the old SSD where all my data was saved, it doesn't look like there's any bootable partition?

To troubleshoot Windows 10 or Windows 11 boot problem, just follow the instructions in this guide, and hopefully you will fix the not booting problem in no time.

FreeBooter said:

To troubleshoot Windows 10 or Windows 11 boot problem, just follow the instructions in this guide, and hopefully you will fix the not booting problem in no time.

Click to expand...

Thanks for providing a link to your video! I followed the steps, but encountered the following error at the last step: "Failure when attempting to copy boot files".

In the Command Prompt window, type the following commands one by one and press Enter after each:




After executing these commands, restart your computer.

To resolve the "failure when attempting to copy boot files" error, you can try copying both UEFI and BIOS files to your disk.


To do this, you can use the following command in the Command Prompt:



The inclusion of "ALL" at the end of the command ensures that both UEFI and BIOS files are copied appropriately.

To attempt to repair drive C: and to write the content from drive C: to drive D: using the 48-digit recovery password specified, type:




To attempt to repair drive C: and to write the content from drive C: to drive D:, where you must type a password to unlock drive C: (when prompted), type:

---

Warning


The contents of the output volume will be completely deleted and overwritten by the decrypted contents from the damaged BitLocker drive. If you want to save any existing data on the selected target drive, move the existing data to other reliable backup media first, before running the repair-bde command.

FreeBooter said:

In the Command Prompt window, type the following commands one by one and press Enter after each:

Code:

bootrec /fixmbr
    
bootrec /fixboot
    
bootrec /scanos
    
bootrec /rebuildbcd

After executing these commands, restart your computer.

To resolve the "failure when attempting to copy boot files" error, you can try copying both UEFI and BIOS files to your disk.


To do this, you can use the following command in the Command Prompt:

Code:

bcdboot c:\windows /s Z: /f ALL

The inclusion of "ALL" at the end of the command ensures that both UEFI and BIOS files are copied appropriately.

Click to expand...

Let me start by thanking you again FreeBooter. I recently found this community and everyone is so helpful!

I unfortunately am not able to complete any of the steps you have suggested.

bootrec fails upon fixboot: access is denied


Copying EUFI and BIOS files to the disk also fails: Failure when attempting to copy boot files.


And attempting to repair-bde C: D: -rp 111111-222222-333333-444444-555555-666666-777777-888888

Please execute below commands one at a time.



Use this command with -Force parameter.


In this video, i will guide you on how to Rebuild the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) to fix some Windows startup issues.