Hey everyone! I'm having some trouble with my Dell XPS 13 9350 (Lunar Lake). After I completed a Dell update, I restarted my laptop and was met with a blue screen asking for my BitLocker key. I entered the key, and it was accepted, but I can't get Windows to start—it just keeps looping back to the same screen whether I enter the key or skip it. The update seemed to involve some drivers, but I don't think it included a BIOS update. I contacted Dell support, and they suggested a motherboard issue, saying they'll send someone to replace it. I suspect it could be a hardware failure related to the motherboard (maybe the TPM or the SSD), but I'm also wondering if it might be a software problem. Although I managed to access my main partition through CMD and recover some data, I can't seem to fix the bootloader. Has anyone else dealt with this? Any guidance would be super helpful—I'd really like to avoid reinstalling all my applications!
2 Answers
It sounds like a frustrating situation! It’s possible that the update triggered a TPM reset, causing issues with BitLocker. If you can access the BIOS, see if there’s an option to reset the TPM key manually. That could help you enter your BitLocker key again. Otherwise, getting those crash dump files from the Minidump folder would be a good next step for troubleshooting too.
I can relate; my XPS 13 had a similar issue after an update recently. It turns out that the BitLocker settings were affected, and all it took was a few tries entering the key for everything to work again. Sometimes it's just a temporary software hiccup! Just keep an eye on it; if it happens again, you might want to dig deeper into potential hardware problems.
Thanks for the tip! I checked the update log, and it wasn't a BIOS update. I even tried to update via Wi-Fi and all seemed fine. I couldn't find the TPM reset option in the BIOS either. But after a bunch of attempts entering my key, Windows finally booted up and even prompted me to reset my PIN! I'm not sure if it's a one-off glitch or something more, but I might cancel the Dell support visit for now.