You have to enter them on every boot before the OS will be able to decrypt the drive. On windows, the key is loaded into memory automatically almost all of the

You have to enter them on every boot before the OS will be able to decrypt the drive. On windows, the key is loaded into memory automatically almost all of the time, and only if it thinks something goes wrong does it suddenly stop working. Or in the case of my colleague, because windows changed his recovery key without notifying him that his backup key was no longer valid. (It deleted it because it thought his key escrow policy had changed, and since that requires generating a new key, it has to delete the old key. Unfortunately escrow policy hadn’t actually changed, so all backup unlocking sources all still had the old key)