In the Dark

This week was going reasonably well, I thought. The class test for my Computational Physics students yesterday went reasonably well; they even managed to upload their code and output to Moodle at the end.

However, when I came into work this morning and started up my laptop, which belongs to Cardiff University, it announced that it was doing a BIOS update. I sighed and then went to make a cup of tea while it did the job. When I got back I found I was locked out by BitLocker, the Windows 10 disk encryption feature that Cardiff University insist is used on its laptops.

There isn’t/wasn’t any USB disk attached to the machine, by the way, and I did try restarting the machine but that didn’t help. I can only infer that BitLocker can’t cope with a change at the BIOS level which, if true, is really pathetic.

Not having the required `recovery key’ (which I have never been given) and being informed by the FAQ that I would need a system administrator to supply it, I got in panicky touch with Cardiff’s IT services, but three hours later I still can’t get in. I do have my desktop (which runs Unix) so am not completely stymied, but I don’t have the files on my laptop. I was planning to work on some things on there today, but it looks like I won’t be able to. It even looks possible that all the data on this laptop is lost for good.

The thing I can’t help thinking about is how terrible this would be if I had been just about to give a talk at a conference….

WINDOWS UPDATE: I’m back into my laptop and have not lost any data (as far as I can tell). The problem is indeed a known conflict between BIOS and BitLocker, which I think is atrocious.

This entry was posted on February 16, 2018 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Bitlocker, Windows 10. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.