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
    2015-11-03T01:17:07+00:00

    I, too, had this problem with BOOTMGR missing and when I tried to fix it using the DiskPart and BootRec utilities, got nowhere.  I also tried to restore the system from an image backup, and got the disk locked error message when I tried to reformat the disk.

      I had been booting the Windows 10 Installation disk by using the F11 boot menu and by chance decided to boot the hard disk from the boot menu rather than just letting it do it automatically.  To my amazement, the system now booted, but on rebooting it using the automatic selection I was back to BOOTMGR missing!!!

      I then used F2 to go into SETUP and see just what the automatic selection was trying to boot.  I discovered that the disk order had been corrupted and it was trying to boot one of my data disks - hence no BOOTMGR!  I corrected the order to put my system disk first and now it boots correctly.  It's a pity I didn't find this BIOS data corruption before I restored my system to one a month old :-(.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-10-15T09:01:25+00:00

    You Windows driver writers need to deal with this. PCs are diverse and one set of drivers does not fit all machines. I have a similar problem to the one cited here when I changed from Windows 8.1 Pro to Windows 10 and all I want at this point is to go back to 8.1 Pro but I can't because I beleved the hype and took on board Windows 10 and other software was installed so I can't go back. I think that you have sent your Beta Windows 10 to market too soon and fished a lot of us in with your marketing campaign without producing the drivers required to cover every machine and the higher spec and more diverse the machine the harder it is for you to produce these drivers.

    I see the problem as being one of the corporate culture of Microsoft and if it doesn't get rectified Microsoft will go away because some disruptive company will produce an operating system that runs circles around yours. Until that happens your the game in town but sooner or later the corporate culture will destroy Microsoft.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-10-13T08:41:19+00:00

    So the trick here to unlock drives via UEFI BIOS is through the boot menu - the one where you can set the priority of drives on which you boot from.  The higher the drive, the better it will be unlocked. Also - if you force the drive to be booted from via UEFI BIOS - just click on it in the boot menu - and it will automatically boot - then it will be unlocked too. 

    @Korianto,

    Changing the BIOS (UEFI) boot device priority making the hard drive first in the list did the trick.  I decided to try this first since it was the easiest, least intrusive, and the quickest to reverse- who knew it would be the best answer (at least for me)

    After making this change, it initially got stuck at the looping dots boot screen, but I forcibly powered off and back on and voila! Windows logon screen baby.

    Thanks again

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-10-02T21:52:11+00:00

    First two commands work great, but when I go to do the 'bootrec /rebuildBCD' it askes me to add an installation to the boot list and I say yes(Y) and then it presents me with the message 'the requested system device cannot be found.' What do I do in this situation???

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