[sc:windows-category ]Recently I went on vacation to Europe for two weeks, I of course took my laptop with me and as always I have BitLocker enabled.
The trip started off with all the classic travel issues you might expect, family emergency at the last-minute, hotel booking being cancelled without any notification and a near death experience at the airport.
However by the second night things had seemed to be going well and I went to bed for a good nights sleep. The next morning I booted up my laptop to check e-mail and was greeted with the BitLocker Recovery screen.
Normally that wouldn’t be a big issue, my recovery keys are stored safely at home and I’d be able to grab a friend’s computer to use to get them. Of course, on vacation that became a bit more of an issue…
My first thought was to check OneDrive, but I didn’t place them there and still believe that to be a bad idea.
Next was to see if I had opened RDP to my home computer as I have the RDP client on my phone unfortunately I hadn’t and so that failed.
I do have SSH available to my Linux box and so I opened the Store on my phone and find a SSH client, which I did. However it turns out I hadn’t installed the packages needed to get access to a Windows file share and trying to use the SSH client was problematic on the phone as it’s keyboard was limited and every time I switch to the web browser to look something up it disconnected me.
Finally I gave in and went out looking for an Internet café I could use. The first one was packed, the second one had several stations available. They were running XP but it had most of what I needed. I downloaded Putty, connected to my Linux box, used the port forwarding in Putty to then RDP to my PC and retrieve my recovery key.
My laptop booted up cleanly after that and I didn’t find anything wrong. I still don’t know why it needed the recovery key but it’s been fine since them.