Bitlocked Drive

[Equilibrium_FOOL]

I've had this 1tb Verbatim portable hard drive for about 3 years.  I use it for back-ups and school.  It has worked great with all of the computers I plug it into.  Until now.  I recently bought a Dell XPS 13 9360, and have been using the portable hdd with the note book for about two months.  Now when I was using the hard drive to back-up my main computer, Windows (7) said that the drive is locked.  I found this highly unusual as my XPS works fine with the drive.  So I then plugged the drive into another Windows (10) pc, and I got an error message: "this drive is locked by bitlocker" (or something to that effect).  For the past while I have been searching for a solution, and discovered that only the "Pro" versions of Windows have bitlocker.  My XPS has Windows 10 Home, so I shouldn't have access to bitlocker.  I couldn't find a setting to disable bitlocker, nor could I find the authentication key.

 

TL;DR

Drive locked by bitlocker, only accessible by new PC.  How to unlock.

 

What do I do to unlock the drive for other users/computers?

[Oshino Shinobu]

If you do not have the key, you cannot unlock it (the double edged sword of encryption). 

 

I would first offload all of the data from the drive using the new PC, then completely wipe the drive. 

[Equilibrium_FOOL]

2 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

If you do not have the key, you cannot unlock it (the double edged sword of encryption). 

 

I would first offload all of the data from the drive using the new PC, then completely wipe the drive. 

Do you have an idea as to why this happened to the external drive?

[Oshino Shinobu]

2 minutes ago, Equilibrium_FOOL said:

Do you have an idea as to why this happened to the external drive?

Not sure on that. As you point out, the Windows 10 Home edition does not support Bitlocker, so it shouldn't even be able to lock the drive using it. 

[Equilibrium_FOOL]

2 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Not sure on that. As you point out, the Windows 10 Home edition does not support Bitlocker, so it shouldn't even be able to lock the drive using it. 

And that is why I am so confused.