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.

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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.

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Anonymous

2014-11-26T01:23:21+00:00

Brother , I am using Surface Pro , and facing same problem ,you were talking about , and I applied all the solutions you discussed but still I am unable to fix my Surface , Plz help me
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Anonymous

2014-11-26T07:31:36+00:00

I have to ask, do I get my windows 8 back?
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Anonymous

2015-01-02T23:39:11+00:00
Let me join the club.

But I have an Asus P9X79 pro motherboard and with its UEFI BIOS I can unlock my C drive. At least, that's what I've done in the past.

I'm going to have to do it again because my Desktop got all funky and Win 8.1 won't boot. When it goes through its checks it then asks for my installation disk, and all I have is win 8 disk, and it tells me that disk is no good. It should work, right? I didn't think I had to make a new win 8.1 installation disk (did I?)

Anyway, when I booted from the win 8 disk and asked it to do a repair, it said my C drive was locked. That's a problem I had when I first built my rig which has four different spots for pull out/plug in drives. It took me awhile to get it working correctly with OS on three different drives, all that could be plugged in at the same time (Windows 7, 8, and 8.1).

Note: not sure how this error occurred n it could be one of three things:
1. What weeks ago I put on a new zip app from a reputable source. I monitored the installation and noticed it did things it shouldn't. Uninstall immediately, then hunted it's changes and fixed them. But next boot it reappeared, and used local app temp to try to install a Trojan. Sigh. I traced the executable to an update checker for lightscribe - deleted that, and to be safe Uninstall lightscribe. Next boot all okay.
2. During those traces I deleted the wrong file from my PC, and since I didn't back it up, I had to do a System Restore. Then when I had window update failures, numerous ones, I tried to restore once again, and the Restore failed.
3. Checked Windows update and noticed that that last few optional failed, so I ran them again. They began their installation, PC rebooted, I got the message that the Updates Failed, my PC rebooted once more, and when it came up once more Win 8.1 was DEAD.
Since the actions were separate, they may have built upon each other, or Windows update screwed up big time. Don't know. Oh, and I didn't fool with the Registry so that didn't do it. Strange, huh.

I'll let you all know if my bios let's me in, or if I get a win8.1 installation disk from my notebook
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Anonymous

2015-01-03T05:40:35+00:00

Read thru all the postings here and still nothing to unlock the SSD drive. Last attempt with the bcdboot left me with no change and then exited the command prompt and attempted to the other fixes and left me with a statement of a required partition is mixing. And I have no Idea on what to try any more. The Dual boot was to an XP OS. I still use it for my scanner and software with a cat 6 switch box to not use any online operation with the os. I don't get the Win 8 / XP select screen to show up at all anymore. So any help or do I just trash this system and machine..
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