BitLocker Recovery Keys are scary

If there’s one thing guaranteed to get my pulse racing its a screen like this. It popped up half way through some updates that my lovely Surface Go was doing. Fortunately, once I’d recovered from the shock, I remembered that I’d seen it before ages ago on some machine or other. The solution to this scary problem is not to search for your Recovery Key, it is to hold down the power button until the machine shuts down. Then reboot and, with a bit of luck, the machine will just recover and start up as normal. That’s what my machine did.

If yours doesn’t you will have to find your key. The good news is that recovery keys seem to be assigned to your Windows account, not on a per-machine basis. So you can use another machine to log into your account and get them.