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.

***Post moved by the moderator to the appropriate forum category.***

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Performance and system failures

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments
Answer accepted by question author
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.

Was this answer helpful?

600+ people found this answer helpful.
0 comments

92 additional answers

Sort by: Oldest
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2013-12-10T12:24:08+00:00

     

    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.

    Thanks, that worked :)

    Penny

    Was this answer helpful?

    3 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2013-12-19T09:57:38+00:00

    Symptoms and such:

    Locked drive, Windows 8, GPT disk with ntfs partitions.

    None of the above worked for me, I had a locked drive with fault 0xc0000001.

    I put a spare hard drive into my system and installed opensuse onto it.

    Opensuse would not overwrite Microsofts bootloader, also stating a locked drive.

    I installed grub2 onto the spare hard drive instead of the default.

    Upon reboot, I expected opensuse to boot and finish its install, but to my surprise, Windows 8 booted instead.

    Was this answer helpful?

    3 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2014-01-05T21:26:43+00:00

    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.

     

     

    Wonderful, phanlon7. It works. Thanks a lot.

     

    I changed the size of Windows 8 partition and the hard disk becames locked.

    I haven't used the first sentence that you propose at command prompt because the W8 partitions are GPT, not MBR, to prevent adding more errors.

     

    I needed to ask to a friend with W8, the creation of a Recovery disk in a USB pendrive from Control Panel of W8 to access to command prompt in my netbook to FIX BOOT and REBUILD BCD only.

     

    Thank you very much again.

    Was this answer helpful?

    3 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2014-01-22T10:06:21+00:00

    Yes this fix worked for me too. Thank you very much.

    Was this answer helpful?

    2 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments