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
    2016-01-15T01:44:15+00:00

    May I ask what is the proper oder?

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-01-21T00:21:54+00:00

    Thanks for the information, was able to get booted from using the commands you listed!

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-01-24T01:22:08+00:00

    Spent three hours frustrated with the same issue (with Windows 10, should be similar for Windows 8 though) and finally figured out how to get around it. Figure I'll pay it forward and save others some time. 

    I figured this out on my Surface Pro 3 but, while the steps for initial troubleshooting and accessing the startup repair menu only apply to surface users, the process for unlocking the drive should be the same for all PCs.

    First of all, sometimes people mistake Windows not booting for it having trouble resuming your session after coming out of sleep (if, for example, you leave it charging overnight). In order to avoid going through the hassle of resetting/refreshing/reinstalling Windows in vain, try a hard restart of the device instead. This is done by holding down the power button for 15 sec and then (without taking your finger off of the power button) holding down both the power button AND the volume up button simultaneously for 15 more seconds. After you've done this, release both buttons and try turning on the PC normally.

    If this doesn't work, you might need to try startup repair. If you're having trouble getting to the startup repair screen again, there's a simple restart trick that can bring it up for you. Hold down the power button for 10 sec, release and then repeat this process four more times (grand total of 50 sec). Eventually, you'll see the Surface loading screen with a new caption underneath, either "Please Wait" or "Attempting Startup Repair". Windows will inevitably inform you that startup failed and will give you the option to either try again or launch the startup repair utility. If you haven't already, try giving the automatic startup diagnostic tool (located under 'Advanced Options') a try, since this can usually resolve minor boot issues. 

    In the startup repair settings, navigate to the 'Restore from Cloud' option. This will prompt you for your BitLocker recovery key to unlock the hard drive. Upon unlocking the drive, it will prompt you to select a wireless network to continue. Do not do this (unless you want to do a fresh install + have already backed up your files since proceeding will delete everything on the drive) and press cancel / exit out of the menu. Once returning to the original startup repair menu, try resetting/refreshing again. Now that the drive is unlocked within the scope of the startup repair utility, it should now only ask you to log in under a user account on the PC and should work fine from there. 

    Also, if your files aren't already backed up (since sometimes refreshing can delete some files), make sure you back them up before attempting any disk repair by booting into safe mode first. This can be done by navigating to 'Advanced Options' > 'Startup Settings' and then pressing the prompted number key to boot into Safe Mode (should be 5). The 'Safe Mode with Networking' option won't enable wifi though, so the only way you'll have access to the internet is if you have a Surface Dock so you can plug in a direct ethernet connection. The best way is probably just to back it all up to a flash drive / external HD and then you're prepared for the worst (god forbid). 

    Hope this helps :)

    -Alex

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  4. Anonymous
    2016-04-27T16:46:06+00:00

    this does not work for me, neither do the other suggestions, someone please help!!!!

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