Hey everyone, my friend's laptop was recently compromised by a ransomware attack that locked the hard drive with BitLocker. To help, I powered it down and disconnected it from any networks before trying to reimage it using the Media Creation Tool on an external drive. However, every time I tried, it redirected me to the BitLocker recovery screen. I then accessed the UEFI settings and used Command Prompt to run DiskPart, which I thought had wiped the disk clean. However, when I proceeded to boot Windows 11, the NVMe drive was no longer available for installation. Given that the BIOS detects the NVMe but DiskPart doesn't, does this mean it might be time for a new NVMe drive? Just so you know, it's an older HP 17 Notebook (model HP 17-by4013dx) and my options in the firmware are pretty limited compared to some of the videos I've watched.
4 Answers
It sounds like the NVMe SSD might need its drivers loaded during the Windows installation process. When you reach the screen where the drives should appear, there’s usually an option to load drivers. Make sure to download the necessary NVMe driver from the HP website and put it on a USB drive. When you get to that screen, use the USB to navigate to the driver file. Sometimes these drivers come as .exe files, but you’ll need the .inf file from that package. Search online for guides on how to extract that.
For future reference, just a note: BitLocker isn’t malware; it’s security software designed to encrypt your data. If this laptop was used for work, the IT department might have handled it differently. Just thought I’d throw that out there!
I get what you're saying. It just sounds like the way you approached the issue led to some confusion.
Another option would be to use HP's Cloud Recovery Tool. HP often has specific recovery tools that may work better with their hardware configurations. It's worth giving that a shot, especially since this is an HP device – they can have some quirks!
You might also want to check the RAID settings in BIOS. Sometimes, the RAID option can hide the SSDs if it's not configured properly. If your BIOS doesn't have a RAID option, at least verify that it's set to the correct mode for your NVMe drive.
I get that, but in this case, it ended up acting like ransomware since it locked us out. Not exactly a smooth fix!