I had an important personal data that was stored in my laptop drive 'F'. My 4 year old son also uses my laptop to play games. To secure my data I used bitlocker software that was already there in my windows 7 ultimate 32 bit. I am using a Dell D 630 Core2Duo laptop. The thing worked fine for me and I have been able to access my data in drive 'F' as and when I required. But today, when I tried to open my 'F' drive, an error box appeared saying "Application not found".

• I right clicked and checked 'properties' of 'F' drive. It showed me Used Space = 0 bytes and Free Space = 0 bytes.

• I opened 'Disk Management' which showed my 'F' drive file system as 'Unknown (Bitlocker Encrypted). 'Disk Management' is also showing my 'F' drive as healthy logical drive.

• I opened 'Manage bitlocker' and found that my 'F' drive was being shown locked and 'Unlock Drive' was displayed against it, however, when i click on 'Unlock Drive', it does not function.

• I opened 'TPM Administration' and found an information that 'Compatible TPM cannot be found'.

My bitlocker encryption was working fine which means that I had a compatible TPM in my laptop. Where has it gone? How can I enable it? Is my 'F' Drive lost forever and thus the data in there as well?