I received a message from a customer on Friday, May 16, about issues logging into her laptop with her usual password. I tried several remote fixes, but the laptop is in Italy while I'm in the Netherlands. I couldn't switch users—there was no option to do so. We attempted to create a temporary admin account using the recovery mode command prompt, but it prompted us for a BitLocker key. The laptop is registered with Entra, so we expected to find the BitLocker key there. However, we discovered that the laptop had been removed from Entra, which led to the loss of both the key and the password access. Deleting a device/account from Entra typically bricks the laptop if there's no local account, and I couldn't find any deleted users or backups. Does anyone have ideas on how we might retrieve the BitLocker key or create a local account on the laptop to access the data? This is on a Windows 11 HP laptop.
2 Answers
Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done if the laptop is deleted from Entra. The only real solution is to get the laptop back and do a fresh OS install to re-add it to Entra. You might have to send her a new laptop and get the old one shipped back to you. Just make sure your users are using cloud storage or a shared drive to prevent losing data like this in the future.
That's tough—sounds like a nightmare. You're right about the risks with relying solely on Entra. Microsoft needs to improve their handling of these scenarios.
You might want to try accessing the laptop with an external keyboard to see if that changes anything with the login. If it still doesn’t work, when you get the laptop back, you could try disconnecting the internal keyboard and see if that makes a difference.
Once you have the laptop back, consider booting from a Linux USB. It might allow you to access the data, but it’s not guaranteed since we don't know what happened to the user profiles.