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
    2017-10-09T01:53:16+00:00

    I have been trying to get most of my laptop to work for a couple  months now, but it just keep getting worst! I know i have noticed a lot of people have this problem and now i do....the only techs that know what or how to resolve these problems are only availiable on special time, guess its time to start looking for a different Window platform and an Offce program. Sucks but i just cut one laptop and 2 more to go then my monthly money is gone too. Ao take your time the unemployment line is waiting for you

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-10-09T13:15:23+00:00

    Welcome to the club.  I am sorry, but while some people have no issues with Microsoft Tech Support, I have had continual issues with them.  This dates back all the way to Windows XP.  Right now i have three hard drives that are locked due to failed patches.  The steps that I have been given to repair the O/S do not work, and because the drives are locked, the refresh will not work either.  I can actually access the HD and get some of data files off them, but because they will not boot I cannot get in to them to get license keys out of the registry to reinstall some of the apps.  They also will not boot into safe mode.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-10-09T23:17:21+00:00

    I gave up too, installed new HD and down graded to Windows 8.1  I also tried to open locked drive using a universal wiring system USB for rescuing files but the drive will not open. I don't know the cause but in the 10 months I had windows  10  I was constantly back and forth with tech services because I noticed my hard drive was filling up and when I would  Optimize it, (defrag) it would acknowledge being done But if I checked again it, it would indicate more fragmentation. I did this for 20 days and when it reached 92% fragmentation it just stopped altogether, this would indicate to me the software, Win 10 was defective.

      Can't help but wonder How many Lost hard drives and files at Microsoft's error.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-10-10T19:32:40+00:00

    I discovered earlier on (Win XP) that the optimization utilities that Microsoft provides actually lie to you about what they do.  Both Edge and IE are still spying on your usage of the system and add garbage back into your system, even when they are not the default browsers.  Neither of Microsoft's Utilities do a good job of cleanup or defragmentaion.   I tried a number of utilities to provide for this problem.  The ones that work the best are CCleaner and Defraggler.  You can get them both as free versions, or pay versions.  I use the free versions.  They can be obtained through Piriform.

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