If your system is asking you for your BitLocker recovery key, the following information may help you locate your recovery key and understand why you're being asked to provide it. Important: Microsoft support is unable to provide, or recreate, a lost BitLocker recovery key.

Having a backup copy of your BitLocker recovery key helps to prevent serious issues later. It takes less than a minute to back up your key and this article will show you how.

Your PC isn't working well and you recently installed an app. Restore from a system restore point. You suspect your device has been infected. Use installation media to reinstall Windows 11. Select one of the recovery options below and follow the steps to try to get things working again.

Surface Recovery Image Download. Surface 2 Surface 3 Surface Book Surface Book 2 - 13 inch More... If you’re having trouble with the recovery options on your Surface, you’ll need to download these files to get it working again.

For Windows 8.1, see Create a USB recovery drive. To download Windows 11 installation media, see Recovery options in Windows. Create a recovery drive so you can reinstall Windows 10 or Windows 11 in case you experience a major issue such as hardware failure.

If some Windows functions aren't working or Windows crashes, use the System File Checker to scan Windows and restore your files. Though the steps below might look complicated at first glance, just follow them in order, step-by-step, and we’ll try to get you back on track.

Use the steps below to verify this. Manually resize your partition by 250 MB. Open a Command Prompt window ( cmd) as admin. To check the WinRE status, run reagentc /info. If the WinRE is installed, there should be a “Windows RE location” with a path to the WinRE directory.

Use this app to try to recover lost files that have been deleted from your local storage device (including internal drives, external drives, and USB devices) and can’t be restored from the Recycle Bin.

Windows Server 2022. Summary. This update automatically applies Safe OS Dynamic Update ( KB5034235) to the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) on a running PC to address a security vulnerability that could allow attackers to bypass BitLocker encryption by using WinRE. For more information, see CVE-2024-20666.

If you can't find a file on your computer or you accidently modified or deleted a file, you can restore it from a backup (if you're using Windows backup) or you can try to restore it from a previous version.