Just recently I had an issue with the webcam on my new Dell XPS 13, 9360. After a couple of times of visit by Dell technicians, it became obvious that the webcam controller on the mainboard is broken, thus the whole mainboard of the system needs to be changed. This was fine, until after the change of the Mainboard while of course keeping my SSD with all my data on it. It was just after the change that both me and the technician realized bitlocker encryption is activated on the SSD when the laptop was shipped to me. Meaning that I can not access my data. After long hours behind customer service of Dell, and long talk with Microsoft support, I have been told that Windows Home 10 does not support bitlocker encryption and I have no other option but to wipe my SSD and install a fresh version on it. Of course this was not an option for me, so I asked for the technician to come back and put my original Mainboard in the laptop, meaning no webcam for a while which I can live with. After a while that I had enough time to search for my problem I found that I can disable encryption in the power shell. This saved me a trouble of losing my valuable data.

To do so:

  1. Open the power shell as administrator, by right clicking on it and choosing “Run as Administrator”.
  2. Check the encryption status of each drive by entering: 
      manage-bde -status
  3. To disable bitlocker enter (note to put quotations too): 
    Disable-BitLocker -MountPoint "<drive letter>:"
    • For example: 
      Disable-BitLocker -MountPoint "C:"
  4. To remove encryption of the desired drive enter: 
    manage-bde -off <drive letter>:
    • For example: 
      manage-bde -off C:
  5. Let the decryption continue in the background such that you have fully decrypted status. You may check the status of Encryption while it is running in the background.
  6. Restart the PC.