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
    2014-03-26T00:21:16+00:00

    It was 8.1 that messed up for me too.  I used one of the fixes above and it worked for a while, but it went kaput again. 

    In the end I did a reinstall of 8 and the problem went away, so it was definitely 8.1 that was the culprit.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-03-29T13:41:35+00:00

    Thankyou!

    after hours of trying to work this out, i disconnected all HDD's other than the main one, created a USB Boot drive and nothing - until i followed the steps above.

    Thanks. if only i knew what to do to prevent this from happening again?

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-03-30T11:32:58+00:00

    I had a hard drive locked message when I tried to run Windows 8 Repair after getting 'Load need DLL's for kernel' at start up.

    Using the bootrec commands worked and got Windows automatic repairs working

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-04-21T14:59:00+00:00

    Same thing happened to me, after countless hours of trying win 8.1 automatic repair, advanced repair commands nothing worked, still locked Hard drive unlock the Hard drive error issue.  Spent a lot of time researching problem and found out one person with same problem said disconnect all wires from the hard drive (boot drive) and then restart the PC, went through the  bios  screen till it had to stop booting, then shut it down reconnected the drive wires and then rebooted with the win8 DVD in DVD drive and windows auto repair fixed the damaged files it said, in about 5 minutes.  The computer runs great right now!  I hope this works for anyone who tries it, good luck!

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