Windows 10 Bitlocker is no longer accepting the password

[EEngineer41]

My Win-10 laptop was booting up slowly and I did something stupid - I powered it down. There wasn't an update during the night before and I didn't notice one upon boot, though I got distracted for maybe 15 seconds.


Upon the reboot, Bitlocker recognized my password but the machine was so slow that I could not log into Win-10. Wondering if I had messed up a UEFI update, I updated the UEFI/BIOS. After that, Bitlocker would not recognize my drive password. It also will not accept the 48-digit "Recovery Key" for the OS drive or separate data drive.


I have tried:

1. running system diagnostics - even the extended tests - within the UEFI/BIOS, and they all pass
2. using Win-10 recovery to get a command prompt. I am unable to unlock the drive using manage-bde with the 48-digit "Recovery Key."
3. using "manage-bde -status c:" and it is locked with key protectors of "Numerical Password" and "External Key"
4. using "manage-bde -protectors -disable C:" but the volume is still locked
5. entering into factory reset with the recovery partition to re-load a fresh version of Win-10. But I cannot delete or format the drive since it is locked. So the software will not allow me to re-write a fresh Windows-10 OS over it.
6. running "bootrec /fixboot" in case I corrupted the boot files, but received an "Access is denied" message

What can I do? Thankfully, my data is backed up. My next step is to perform a "Factory Reset." If that doesn't work - would replacing the internal OS hard drive work - or is the problem elsewhere?


Thanks for you time,


EEngineer41

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