I booted up a PC that I haven't used in some time, and while using it windows promptly asked me to update windows so I obliged.
Upon rebooting, I was greeted with a Bitlocker Recovery screen.
Completely forgot about this, hadn't seen it since it was setup a couple years ago.
No worries- I picked a unique and memorable password just for this use case.
BUT- it is not asking me for a passphrase! It starts off asking for the key, looks to be just a numeric code, and then on the next screen if I don't know the key, it proceeds to ask me again for the same key I just indicated I didn't have...
I thought maybe brute forcing since its only numbers but 48-digits, trying 10million/sec would only take 3.17 x 10^33 years sooo..
3 big questions:
Is there any way I can enter the passphrase to unlock this drive? Why did I create a passphrase, when is the thing used if not now???
Can I make an image of this drive onto some storage drive and save it while I continue to search for the key.txt? Can I 'mount' the image and continue to try to unlock the bitlocker?
Least likely- is there any weakness/exploit with bitlocker? Can I put the locked drive in an external enclosure and spin up some wild linux distro and hack away at it?