cannot access BitLocker encrypted external hard drive and lost recovery key

I have a dell laptop and just 2 weeks ago I installed Windows 7 Ultimate on it. So I thought of using the BitLocker feature on it and encrypted my external hard drive but I didnt use a usb drive and also didnt save the recovery key that I printed out, although I can remember the password. Now the problem is that I am not able to access the hard drive and instead of password it is asking me for the recovery key. Can anyone help me out?

You can try to use the BitLocker Recovery Password Viewer tool for Active Directory Users and Computers tool to view recovery passwords but to use this tool to retrieve BitLocker Drive Encryption passwords, you must use an account that has sufficient rights. You must be a domain administrator, or you must be granted sufficient rights by a domain administrator. More information can be found here.

You should always keep copies of your keys and recovery passwords stored offline while working with BitLocker or any other drive encryption tool. You should know that you can select all of your keys in Windows Explorer then right click and send them all to a compressed folder and if you dont have the key then your data is eternally irretrievable.

I think there is way to break the BitLocker Encryption by using third party services like from Homeland Security or maybe some other well financed group. Actually you also lost the certificate that you needed when you forgot to create a 'password reset disk' for the old user accout. You can check out some suggestions given in similar type of topics here - http://forums.techarena.in/networkin...ty/1293408.htm
http://forums.techarena.in/windows-software/1320544.htm