You open This PC and something is wrong: one of your drives now wears a little padlock icon. You did not ask for it, you did not set a password, and the immediate thought is that your files are locked away. In most cases, relax — this particular padlock is a two-minute fix, not a disaster. But there is a second, scarier version of this problem that looks similar and is not a quick fix at all, so the first job in this guide is telling the two apart. Get that right and the rest is easy.
First: Which Padlock Is Yours?
Windows shows a padlock overlay on a drive icon when BitLocker drive encryption is switched on for that drive. That is the common case, and it is the one this guide fixes. But if the drive is fully locked, the symptoms are completely different — and so is the solution.
| Padlock overlay (this guide) | Truly locked drive | |
|---|---|---|
| What you see | Padlock on the drive icon in File Explorer; the drive still opens normally | Windows refuses the drive or demands a 48-digit recovery key before anything opens |
| Your files | Accessible right now | Inaccessible until the correct recovery key is entered |
| Fix | Turn off BitLocker (below), restart, done | Enter the recovery key; there is no bypass |
If you can still open the drive and read your files, you are in the first column — keep reading. If you are staring at a recovery-key prompt, skip to the “If It Is Actually Locked” section near the end, because the steps below will not help you.
Why the Padlock Appears
The padlock does not appear at random; something changed the machine’s identity as far as encryption is concerned. The usual triggers are a fresh Windows setup (many modern computers enable device encryption automatically during setup, without making a fuss about it), a BIOS setting change, or a hardware swap — a new motherboard, processor, or even RAM. Moving a hard disk or SSD from one PC to another is another classic trigger: the drive arrives in a machine it does not recognise, and Windows marks it accordingly.
The presenter in the video knows this pattern well — with five or six office computers that regularly get motherboard and processor swaps during upgrades, he has seen the padlock turn up again and again. It is a side effect of a security feature doing its job, not a sign that anything is broken. Under the hood, the reason hardware swaps trigger it is the TPM — the small security chip on the motherboard that BitLocker trusts. Change the motherboard and you change the chip; change the processor or certain firmware settings and the measurements the chip reports no longer match what BitLocker recorded. Windows responds the cautious way: it flags the drive rather than silently trusting a machine it no longer recognises.
One naming wrinkle worth knowing: on Windows Pro you will see this feature called BitLocker, while on Windows Home the same encryption is usually labelled “Device encryption” under Privacy & security. The padlock icon is identical either way, and so is the fix — the panel you reach from the right-click menu is the same. If your edition shows no “Manage BitLocker” entry at all, check the Device encryption page in Settings instead; the on/off switch there does the same job.
The Fix: Turn Off BitLocker
Open File Explorer, go to This PC, and right-click the drive with the padlock. In the menu, click Manage BitLocker. That opens the BitLocker Drive Encryption panel, which lists each drive and its encryption state.
Find your drive in the panel and click Turn off BitLocker, then confirm when Windows asks. That is the whole fix — but one detail matters: turning BitLocker off starts decryption, and decryption takes time. A small SSD may finish in minutes; a large, full hard disk can take considerably longer. You can keep using the PC while it works, but do not interrupt it, and do not be surprised if the padlock lingers until decryption is fully complete.
While decryption runs, the BitLocker panel shows its progress, and you may also see the drive described as “BitLocker on” changing to a decryption percentage. If instead the panel says protection is “suspended” — a state Windows uses during certain updates — the entry you want is still “Turn off BitLocker”, not “Resume protection”: resuming would simply re-lock the drive and bring the padlock back. Once decryption has finished, restart the PC. When it comes back up, open This PC again: the padlock should be gone, and the drive behaves like any ordinary drive. That is the entire procedure — no tools, no commands, no reinstall.
After the icon disappears, take thirty seconds to confirm everything is genuinely fine: open a few folders on the drive, play one media file, open one document. If the drive moved to a new machine, confirm it shows up there with its full capacity and no warning. Decryption problems are rare, but they are much easier to deal with while you still remember exactly what you changed — not a week later when something else has gone wrong.
Moving a Drive to Another PC? Do It in This Order
This is the advice from the video that saves people real grief. If you plan to move a drive from one PC to another, do not just unplug it and install it in the new machine. First, put it back in the original PC, copy your data off it (or turn BitLocker off there, as above), and only then move the bare drive. A drive that arrives encrypted in a foreign machine is the single most common way the padlock — and worse, the full lock — appears. It does not happen every time, which is exactly why people get caught by it: the one time it does happen is the time it hurts.
What if you already moved the drive and the padlock is showing in the new machine? The same logic applies. If the drive still opens in the new PC, just turn BitLocker off there using the steps above — the encryption will unwind and the icon will go. If the new PC instead demands a recovery key, stop and go back: reinstall the drive in the original machine, where it should still open, and copy your data off before you move it again. Trying random keys or third-party “unlock” tools in between will not help and can waste the one good chance you have, which is the original hardware.
If It Is Actually Locked
If your drive is demanding a recovery key, the situation is different and honesty matters more than optimism: BitLocker cannot be cracked. There is no tool, trick, or back door that opens an encrypted drive without its key — that is the entire point of the encryption. Your options are the places the key may already be saved: your Microsoft account online (the most common one for a personal computer), a USB drive you saved it to during setup, a printout, or your organisation’s IT system for a work PC. Enter the 48-digit key and the drive opens; without it, the data stays encrypted. This is why the video keeps the two cases separate — one is a settings annoyance, the other is a data-recovery problem.
Should You Keep BitLocker On?
Turning it off is the right call if the encryption was never your choice and you just want a plain drive. But BitLocker itself is not the villain here — on a laptop that travels, encryption is genuinely valuable protection if the machine is lost or stolen. The sane middle ground is: if you keep encryption on, save the recovery key somewhere you can actually reach in an emergency (your Microsoft account is the easiest), and note down which drive it belongs to. The padlock icon is only scary when you do not know why it is there. As for performance, the old worry about encryption slowing a drive is mostly history: any reasonably modern processor handles AES encryption in hardware, so the overhead is negligible in everyday use. On a very old machine without that hardware support you might notice a small difference, but for most people the speed question should not decide this — the recovery key question should.
So the rule of thumb is simple: padlock you can see past — right-click, Manage BitLocker, turn it off, restart. Recovery key prompt you cannot get past — find the key, because nothing else will open that drive. Knowing which one you are looking at is half the fix.
Quick checklist, for the next time the padlock shows up: can you open the drive? If yes, right-click → Manage BitLocker → Turn off BitLocker → wait for decryption → restart. Moving the drive? Copy the data off in the original machine first. Locked out completely? Recovery key from your Microsoft account, USB, or printout — and if none of those exist, accept that the encryption has done exactly what it was designed to do.
