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

OK - so recently had Windows10Pro crash - simply would not boot - like the HD had failed .. since I had seen some issues with the drive for some time - explorer and other systems telling me the drive was full (and it should not have been more than half) I quickly assumed the SSHD had packed it in - it was 500GB drive and post re-install which would mean about the same stuff on it as before it has <150GB - so why it thought it was full I dont know.

I have a few drives lying around - so I took the opportunity to tear apart the system, replace the SSHD with a standard HD, clean and re-install Win10Pro from scratch (and RMA the SSHD which I now think was ok).  Of course, its the better part of a day to do this which is a huge pain.

All worked well it seemed and I reattached 3 HDs that formed a windows storage space.  I was very happy to see the the system recognised that.  Did a quick copy to it. ahhhh life's good

And, then tried a re-start which brought me full circle back the original issue - system would not boot - basically did not see the boot drive and wanted to boot from DVD or other bootable media.  Tried installing the Disc for recovery but got the dreaded

• your drive is locked issue.

Reading some of these posts, what I did was power down, remove (disconnect) the 3 Storage Space drives and repower and boot - and it seems to be fine again (although not sure for how long) - no issues with the drive (why I now think the original SSHD might have been okay). 

SO - is it the Mboard, the drivers OR what I really suspect - a more than useless Microsoft Update that caused this issue with the drive recognition - I see they have screwed up the Network detection again on another computer of

mine.

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.

54I upgraded to windows 10 and my pc gets too hot.  So I tried to reinstall windows 8 and hard drive is locked.  I did the boot to command prompt and the bootrec commands.  They all said successful.  Yet the drive is still locked.  HELP!

I am running win8.0 on a Gateway SX2370-UR13.

I get the msg that the hard drive is locked & I need to unlock it every time I try to refresh or reset, yet I can boot to the desktop by:

Start

tap Esc

f9

move down to the EFI hard drive listed

Enter

Is this a false msg that my hard drive is locked?

How do I unlock the hard drive, if msg is true? 

Is there a way to make SURE my hard drive is unlocked?

I've tried all kinds of things listed at this website & gotten nothing that answered my questions, just more run-around, specially from anyone at Microsoft, they persist at being a$$holes without giving any working solutions to anyone.

This is probably the way to fix your problem:

1. Start your computer and enter the BIOS setup program (usually F2)
2. move to the BOOT section.
3. Check that a HARD DRIVE is in the list of boot devices, usually the first but it could appear after say a DVD/CD device if you wish to be able to insert and boot a DVD/CD installation kit at any time.
4. enter the HARD DRIVEs section.
5. Make sure that your EFI drive is the first hard drive listed.
6. Save and exit, your computer should boot properly.