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
    2013-07-25T01:08:50+00:00

    Have you tried all of these options on another computer? That's what made it work for me. Another thing, if you try it on another computer, run Command Prompt as an administrator (when Windows has booted up, not from the Windows Install DVD/USB)

    It also doesn't matter if it was a Seagate, Toshiba or any brand of hard drive because the process of unlocking them is the same.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-08-09T12:53:54+00:00

    Have you tried removing the hard drive out of your computer/laptop and copying your files from your locked drive to another computer or another hard drive then erasing your locked hard drive, installing Windows 7 or 8 (either, won't matter) then copying your files back from the computer you just backed up your files too?

    It sounds like a long process but if you have the time to do this (takes about 1 - 4 hours) you will be happy because your computer will work!

    This is a load of rubbish anyway: http://vetalk.com/windows-8-hard-drive-lock-solution/

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-08-09T16:19:43+00:00

    After seeing all the trouble everyone else was having, too, I installed Ubuntu and it has worked fine. So I wasted the cost of one Windows 8 upgrade, but my other installations of it still work.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-10-15T22:31:05+00:00

    Hello everybody,, i have same problem with locked drive. This is the second time, first was about 4 months ago. This time happens just yesterday, i was playing wow and burning a dvd for my wife when suddenly windows froze and i was forced to press power button to shut down. The first time i just run repair from dvd and after several tries work and was worked fine until yesterday. Now it seems nothing work this time i tried all recommendations here:  unplug drives leaving only c drive,, change ahci to ide, bootrec.exe /FixMbr bootrec.exe /FixBoot, refresh reset options repair none worked,, sometimes after several restart windows was able to load but only for 1 or 2 minutes and then froze again given me the screen error and back to same problem. Hope this problem will be solved soon. Thx in advance..

    Asrock X79 Extreme

    CPU: Intel i7 3820

    16Gb memory

    MSI GTX 760

    OCZ vertex 4 (windows 8 and wow only)ssd 128gb

    250gb hdd (program files)

    2tb hdd (data)

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