I'm in a bit of a panic and really need some help. I was trying to set up a dual boot system with two Windows 10 installations. My idea was to have a more sandboxed environment separate from my main OS. To protect against either OS accessing each other's files, I decided to enable BitLocker on my main drive. However, now I'm facing a major issue:
My main operating system isn't accepting my recovery key, even though I'm sure it's the right one and the identifier matches. I've attempted to use command prompts with admin privileges on the other OS and even tried accessing the drive through an M.2 SSD enclosure to see if that would help, but I keep getting the error message: "An error occurred while attempting to read the key from disk."
It feels like BitLocker just completely locked me out before I could restart my OS after setting everything up. I'm really worried and could use any advice you have. Thanks!
2 Answers
Honestly, if you’re stuck like this, it might be easier to just wipe the drive and install the Windows Sandbox feature instead. Dual booting is becoming obsolete with modern processors supporting virtualization, so there's usually no need for it anymore.
Not much you can do if the key is being rejected; it’s likely corrupted or recorded incorrectly. Hopefully, you’ve got backups. Just a heads up for next time: virtual machines are generally more reliable than dual boots nowadays. Also, if you’re using an outdated Windows 10 version, consider upgrading to 11.
I do have backups of my important files, but it’s still a huge hassle! I guess this is a learning experience with BitLocker. I thought dual booting would help me utilize my GPU, but I should have looked into GPU passthrough for a VM instead, even if it's more complex.