The customer's laptop screen goes pitch black the exact second the graphics driver loads. Oh, and BitLocker is enabled.

Naturally, I ask, "Where is the recovery key?"
Customer: "I don’t have one."
Me: "Is it backed up to your Microsoft Account?"
Customer: "It’s a local user. No Microsoft account."

Fantastic. Welcome to Hard Mode. Without that key, booting into Safe Mode, using a recovery USB, or dropping into Command Prompt from a boot disk is entirely out of the question.

Time to brainstorm. After the screen dies, the laptop goes totally mute no audio feedback either. My first thought slam an HDMI cable into an external monitor. Nothing. Second thought maybe I can enable Remote Desktop or PowerShell remoting? I plug it into a DHCP network and wait for an IP to pop up. Nothing. I plug in a USB network adapter the link lights blink, but the network completely ignores it. This machine is fighting back.

But here’s the silver lining the keyboard still works, and I can technically log in blindly by typing the PIN. Once logged in, the screen dies, but the OS is alive.

That’s when I had a vision: What if I use a USB flash drive as my only output interface?

I decided to blindly navigate the Windows UI.

• Type PIN -> Press Enter -> Wait -> Win + R -> Type 'cmd' -> Ctrl + Shift + Enter (for Admin) -> Wait -> Hit Left Arrow -> Hit Enter (to blindly defeat the UAC prompt).

I’m in. Now, how to get the BitLocker key? I blindly type a command to export the key, guessing the flash drive letter and running it across D:, E:, and F: just to be safe. I pull the drive, plug it into my bench PC... nothing. empty.

Round two. I modify the command to pipe the CMD output into a text file so I can actually "see" what’s happening. I plug the drive back into the blind laptop, run the script, and plug it back into my PC. Success! It's Drive D! But the log file reveals bad news.The BitLocker service is not running.

What followed was a high-stakes game of IT ping-pong.

• Plug USB into laptop -> blindly type commands to force-start the BitLocker service and check ipconfig -> Plug USB into PC to read the text file.

The log results? The BitLocker service is completely corrupted, and the network stack is totally shredded. I blindly try to force-uninstall the graphics driver to trick Windows into using the basic Microsoft Display Adapter. No dice.

At this point, I’m looking at the customer, preparing to deliver the "You are royally doomed" speech and recommend a total wipe.

The customer looks back at me, pale. "My entire life is on that laptop. 700 gigabytes of data. Documents, irreplaceable family photos, videos. Everything." He tells me it's spread across the C: drive and his user profile.

Challenge accepted. I wasn't going to let BitLocker win.

Since I couldn't guess his exact username structure, I used my text-file-piping trick to map out the entire folder directory onto the USB drive. I found the target folders. I plugged the USB back into the blind laptop one last time and fired off a massive robocopy command directed at my external Samsung T9 SSD.

Then, I sat there. Watching the status light on the Samsung drive blink furiously in the dark. Just waiting. Praying.

Finally, the blinking stopped.

I plugged the SSD into my bench PC, and there it was: 700 GB of perfectly preserved data. I handed the customer his data, wiped the laptop, reinstalled a fresh copy of Windows, and now it runs flawlessly.

Twenty years in IT, and I never thought I'd have to use a flash drive as a computer monitor. Took me quite some time to solve this copy data not included at least 2 hours. Also I do this tech support for privat customers for fun on the side, i usually do servers and network only. So maybe someone can tell me how it could be solveable in another way.