Condensed Backstory: My teen son’s PC of 3 years recently became a brick thanks to Bitlocker and the initiating screen saying “apply” or “skip”. Unaware, he clicked “skip” and there was no going back. Out of the blue, the Bitlocker screen arose after a bootup one day, and now he is locked out having no password or “key”. I think, at one point, he had a chance to synch with his MS account, but he may not have had an MS account at the time. As I understand it, he thought he could retroactively synch the two, but that was not to be.
Anyhow, in need of a working PC, we bought him a new PC for the coming holidays . How can he avoid the same thing happening? Googling, I read this complicated rigmarole by Microsoft making sure the BIOS has this or that, plus other esoteric steps foreign to me, the average user. While I do see where Bitlocker seems to be part of the Control Panel, my questions boil down to this:
A) To avoid stepping into the same trap, will a brand new PC (upon initial boot-up or soon thereafter) go through some Bitlocker Wizard for easy setup (as long as he doesn’t click “skip”)? Or, is the user expected to initiate it (i.e., access via Control Panel)?
B) If the user is expected to initiate Bitlocker, does one have to be some computer wizard to set-up Bitlocker checking for a TPM chip, some firmware stored in the BIOS, and a hard drive partition formatted with an NTFS file system, or such IT-jargon. Is it really this difficult because I have no clue how to check and/or manipulate such things.
C1) Can some IT-guru post simpler steps to follow, or a link for dummies to walk through Bitlocker setup?
C2) Last, it true that, since Bitlocker encrypts the hard drive, all files are encrypted and cannot be shared? :rollseyes: