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

Anonymous
2013-02-09T21:56:17+00:00

Hi

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.

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Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Performance and system failures

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Anonymous
2013-10-12T11:15:49+00:00

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.

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-07-24T15:40:44+00:00

    Hi did you ever get this resolved? I have the same issue. My hard drive is locked. I have booted with windows 8 and 7.I tried all the options refresh advanced and the command line option. My c drive isnt recognized. says not ready in the command. The diagnostics doesnt work.

    Does anyone know how to unlock a samsung hard dive? This was running windows 7 home then upgraded a few months ago to windows 8 home. This is a DELL XPS desktop

    Thanks in advance

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-05-24T10:18:15+00:00

    Hi, tnx for replying.

    But as you might saw in my post I dont have an laptop, its a desktop PC...

    I dont have an recovery cd...

    I can maybe try with windows 7 tho...

    Ty!

    EDIT: I've tried that with win 7, and I lost all my restores... And still having the same problem...

    Any ideas?

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-05-24T09:55:50+00:00

    Checkout this ( http://vetalk.com/windows-8-hard-drive-lock-solution/ ) may b it helps

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-05-23T17:06:21+00:00

    I tried all of these that you guys suggested... Im getting 0xc000021a error, or I just cant boot.

    I had an ssd caching with my 3tb hdd in IRST, ofcourse GPT, UEFI and such.

    Im not sure how can I unlock the hdd to ty the system restore, everything I tried with UEFI didnt worked...

    Imhave Asus P8Z77-V MBO... If this means something to you to help me...

    Plz somehow, suggest me what else can I try, or make some steps...

    I also tried disconnecting all hard drives and its the same...

    Thank you!

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