How to create your own USB startup key from scratch on Windows 11

Dave W Shanahan
5 min readMay 20, 2022

Did you know you can use just about any USB drive as a “startup key” on Windows 11? When you enable BitLocker on newer PCs, Windows automatically unlocks your system drive every time you start up your computer using Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

The ability to add an extra level of security with the convenience with using a USB startup key on a…

--

--

Dave W Shanahan

OnMSFT.com. Tech Writer. I love to write about Microsoft and other stuff.