eliksir

I'll start with a description of how I got where I am. I have an
external HDD (attached via USB) that I encrypted with Bitlocker on a
Windows 7 setup. Recently the drive stopped responding - it didn't
show up as a drive letter when I plugged it into the USB port. I
suspected that the drive itself was still working since I never heard
it make the typical clicking noise. I took it out of it's enclosure
and plugged it in directly to a SATA port on the mobo. When windows
came up, it didn't prompt me for the Bitlocker password, so I launched
disk administrator which showed it as an attached unformatted drive.
It also told me that it has to initialize the file system which I
suspected to mean that the MBR got corrupted on the drive. In hopes of
fixing this, I detached the OS drive and used the windows 7 dvd to
boot the setup and selected the repair option. I then reattached the
OS drive and rebooted. Now when windows comes up, it asks me to format
the drive that is encrypted. To make things clear: the file system of
the OS that I used to encrypt the drive is in tact. It just doesn't
know that the contents of the drive are locked.

So now the question is, can I recover the files on the encrypted
external drive? I've checked out the info on the Bitlocker recovery
tool but I can't locate the recovery password or recovery key....I
only have the password I used to unlock it in windows when it was
working before. However, I did find a file that is named
bitlocker.pfx. I might have named the file that when I originally
locked the drive. I don't really remember.