Thanks, I just used their PayPal link to send my support and light my torch!

https://archive.org/donate/

Exactly. After reading through some forums it sounds like BitLocker may have been enabled at the factory initially but I had never noticed and since I didn’t set it up myself I had no key. So anyone reading this and running windows: right click your C: drive and see if BitLocker is enabled. If it’s enabled and you didn’t enable it or don’t have the key then disable the encryption. You can re-enable it afterwords and safely backup your new key so you never find yourself in this situation.

Last week I had the lovely experience of it also pushing a bios update that enabled bitlocker and locked me out of my drive. I had to completely wipe the laptop and lose the data.

Nail. Coffin. Good riddance.