As a happy Surface 2 owner, one of the things that I had been experiencing was the occasional prompt for my BitLocker key. Why was it occasional? Because it only happened after the device had been restarted, so depending on the monthly updates that it pulled down it didn’t occur often enough for me to do anything about it.

This week it happened again, but the reason was acceptable to me – it occurred as part of the process of installing the update that was required to fix it. Thankfully getting access to the recovery key was easy enough because it being associated with my Microsoft Account, and the prompt for the key entry also provided the relevant URL – http://windows.microsoft.com/recoverykey, which was a lifesaver.

This update doesn’t apply to Surface Pro 2, Surface Pro, or Surface, it’s specific to Surface 2. It wasn’t something that I had seen widely reported, but then again I hadn’t gone looking for a fix because it was more a minor annoyance than a showstopper.

Here’s the link to the support article, and the symptoms description.

Surface 2 prompts you for the BitLocker recovery key when you restart the device

When you use a Surface 2 device, you are prompted to enter your BitLocker recovery key after you turn on or restart the device or you resume the device from the sleep state. These messages may be random or they may occur every time that you try to restore the device to operation.

Note These BitLocker-related messages are the only visible symptom. This problem does not affect your system in any other way.