Windows crash - Refresh - Hard drive locked, unlock hard drive

Anonymous

I have recently purchased a new pc and installed windows 8 with no problem. Then booting it up a week later it gave an error message, which i can’t remember now what it said but I chose default setting and then the pc reset. Now windows won’t start up at all. It says please identify the boot able drive or insert a boot able media. None of the option from the windows 8 dvd help. When i try reset it states my hard drive is locked please unlock hard drive first. I have tried googling on how to unlock the hard drive but have found nothing. Also when i try doing a fresh install it can’t find a hard drive. My pc is only 2 weeks old so don’t think it’s the hardware. There are settings in the bios which I think could be causing the issue but don’t know anything about them. Also bios can see my hard drive.

***Post moved by the moderator to the appropriate forum category.***

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

Answer accepted by question author

Anonymous

Hi everyone. I had this issue happen twice now. I got a blue screen of death during PC use and then when I reboot I get a blue screen saying \Windows\system32\winload.exe is missing.

The first time I was unable to work out how to unlock my SSD so done clean install losing all data.(Thankfully I had a backup on a server of important stuff) I have the Windows 8 DVD but it was unable to recover, reset or auto resolve. The problem seems my hard drive was locked. I believe the master boot record or something was corrupted during the crash and the drive is locked by windows. Hence I am unable to mount the disk unless I define it as a new volume which is essentially wiping it.

Here's what I done to unlock:

I booted from the win 8 DVD

Went into a command prompt and ran a few bootrec commands:

Bootrec /fixMBR

bootrec /fixBoot

bootrec /rebuildBCD

I then went back into the win 8 auto repair and it seemed to work.

I have no idea why windows 8 has now had 2 fatal crashes. My PC is ~6 years old and previously ran Vista with no issues. Bought a new SSD with windows 8 back in April and had it fail twice!!

Motherboard Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus

CPU: Intel Q6600

MSI Geforce 8800GT

Creative SoundBlaster XFi Extreme Fidelity

4 gig Corsair MSRX2 RAM

Sandisk 128Gb SSD

I'm wondering if it's because my PC is old and got some driver incompatibility with win 8. Hence just turned on windows driver verifier today and will leave running for a week to check. I've never overclocked my PC. Might bite the bullet and upgrade my PC fully to a core i7, new mobo etc but no idea if this will solve the issue. I am less than impressed with windows 8 because of this.

0 comments

92 additional answers

Anonymous

2015-04-03T04:26:17+00:00

Thank you a thousand times over. Spent hours trying to revive my mom's laptop and was about to get a new SSD and restart from scratch. Luckily I came across this thread and your fix!

Much appreciated.
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2015-02-03T12:26:05+00:00

thanks it works
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2015-01-11T19:03:21+00:00

Here's what I done to unlock:

I booted from the win 8 DVD

Went into a command prompt and ran a few bootrec commands:

Bootrec /fixMBR

bootrec /fixBoot

bootrec /rebuildBCD

I then went back into the win 8 auto repair and it seemed to work.

this always worked for me in the past when i had the same type problems with older versions of Windows and just worked now for 8. pretty simple fix for a rather annoying problem.

if you can't find your command prompt it's in advanced options under repair section from your install media.
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments
Anonymous

2015-01-05T03:13:40+00:00

Well, I used Bios to use it as the Boot drive and that unlocked it - but as before, I kept getting all the errors. I finally had to go in under Win 7 and back up my folders on my Boot drive - the one with the problems.

Then I tried to reinstall Win 8. Guess what - it came up with the same error - drive was locked! Grrrr.

I got fed up - so I hot swapped a new drive into my tower, a new 264gb SSD to use as a new boot drive. Went back in to install Win 8 and the list of drives came up - including the bad one. But if I selected it, Windows then said to FIX the drive - which we all know didn't work. So there was no way to Reinstall Win 8 on that boot drive for some reason - strange, huh?

So I selected the new blank drive to have Win 8 installed - and guess what - it said it was LOCKED! Grrrr.

Went back into BIOS and set it so that drive was the BOOT drive and the CD drive was secondary. Rebooted, and of course I didn't get the message to select boot from CD/DVD and it tried to boot from the new C - the blank drive - got error - no operating system found - system then rebooted itself -

went into BIOS right away - selected the boot from the CD drive and then it came up - and I was able to select the new C drive to install Win 8.

So the trick here to unlock drives via UEFI BIOS is through the boot menu - the one where you can set the priority of drives on which you boot from. The higher the drive, the better it will be unlocked. Also - if you force the drive to be booted from via UEFI BIOS - just click on it in the boot menu - and it will automatically boot - then it will be unlocked too.

you may have to fool with going in and out of BIOS to get the right sequence of booting from the CD drive and unlocking the right boot drive - but it is capable of doing it.

But - you may run into the error that I did - that if you try to reinstall Window's on the bad boot drive - it won't let you. yep - for some strange, unknown reason - it will not let you.

========================

Right now - I have my new boot drive - but I have to reorganize everything else - and will most likely need to reinstall lots of programs. I checked event viewer and I keep getting registry errors because for some strange reason - it's got a mix of the old and new registries - ain't that sumthin'?

K
Was this answer helpful?

0 comments No comments