Halloween doesn’t spook me, but a tale from Reddit recently did. Imagine you’re living your best life, only to realize your PC isn’t quite doing the same. You decide to give Windows 11 a full wipe to get things running smoothly again. But after the reinstall of the operating system, you discover that not only did Windows encrypt your drives without your knowledge, you don’t have the encryption keys to unlock some of them.

This frightfest comes from user Toast_Soup (h/t Tom’s Hardware ), who says they lost 3TB of games and backup data to this scenario. In the post, Soup mentions never having turned on BitLocker, which makes the outcome all the more bewildering—especially since only their boot drive and these two storage drives (of six total drives) were locked up tight.

Veterans of Bi

See Full Page