Can't boot into windows 8,hard drive locked, can't refresh

[SIW2]

You are right, "Drive is locked" is a useless message. The real issue was that it was booting the wrong bit version of winre.wim.


I am trying to get the enterprise trial to refresh an installed version of Pro.

No luck so far. It appears to go ok, then finally on reboot , it says it failed. No explanation is given of course.

 

[garyoreilly12]

I am getting very similar messages but I am actually able to use my machine, to a certain extent. I do not have a solution, but would obviously love one.

I've said most of this in another area of the forum, but here goes.

I'm running Windows 8.1 on a machine with Windows 8 pre-installed. About 4 months old, Acer laptop, mid specs.

The laptop would not shutdown or restart, it would just hang, saying 'shutting down' or 'restarting'. I would have to turn it off manually. This never really cleared up. When deleting programs that needed a restart they would never go of course.

I looked up a solution for this, which others had had success with, changing some power options, etc, but nothing helped.

I then decided I'd better do a system restore, but I didn't have any restore points, which seems odd as I had restored it once before.

I then tried to refresh the system (never heard of that option before) and it would again just 'hang' saying 'preparing'. The same for resetting.

I tried to restore to factory settings and came up with those error messages we are all to aware of

After trying to refresh the PC is says the 'drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive to try again'

And after trying to reset 'the PC it says unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing.'

This brought me here and I'm still stuck. I gather something is up with Windows not fully recognising the C drive which is where Windows is installed. When I click on disk management it says 'connecting to virtual disk service...' but then does nothing.

So the problem is similar to others, but different in so much as I can still go on Windows and do lots of things but it won't be very useful in the long term.

I've been using comps for 15 years and although not very good at IT have always been able to solve the problems by just reading forums posts of people who have same problem as me. This is the first time I have actually joined a forum to get help.

So I'm not even sure who I should speak to, is this an issue where I should contact Windows? or Acer? or the company I actually bought the computer from? I haven't a clue.

Wow, I can talk a lot, thanks for the patience.

 

[pjhutch]

The first people you should see is the company you bought it from as they should now more about the product than anyone else.
Acer's support pages are not helpful in this case.

 

[nmjoth]

What worked for me

Hi All,
First of thanks a lot for the abundant information and sharing of experiences on this forum. It helped me a lot.
I would like to share my experience here.
I had a the same issue on my Dell Inspiron 14 laptop running Windows 8. I installed Malwarebytes and scanned for malware. It complained a few and I removed them and the software promted me to restart the system. The restart was never ending. Therefore, I forced shutdown by pressing the power button. That was it. It never started back and stops at the Dell logo.

None of the Refresh/Reset/system restore, repair worked. It said, "Drive is locked".
Finally this worked for me:

1. Continue to press F2 a couple of times during the startup to enter the BIOS.
2. Advanced -> SATA Operation in BIOS settings from Smart Response Technology to ATA (Changing to AHCI didnt work for me).
3. After I changed this to ATA, the drive was unlocked.
4. I then made a "System Refresh" and this took some time.
5. Restarted the system and logged in using "Safe mode".
6. Made sure all my data (although nothing important on C drive) were there.
7. Then restarted and changed the BIOS setting to Smart Response Technology.
8. All good.
I hope this helps.

 

[wins]

One of my drive locked last night. I installed Windows8 on another drive and ran this on Command Prompt (Admin mode)


DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth


DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth


The computer did a drive scan restarting couple of times on its own... the locked harddrive partitions had reappeared

 

[XZeeR]

Hello guys, i think i just fixed it so i'll leave what i've done for future generations.

First, the problem started when i installed Ubuntu on dual boot with Windows 8.1 , then i've decided to delete Ubuntu by removing the partition and restored to secure boot, this has clearly screwed up my boot manager and created the exact same problem as with the original poster, Symptoms:

- Locked C:, so cannot refresh,reset,restore or any other
- Boot entries missing, whether in msconfig, EasyBCD, or any other program, so FixMBR is useless
- cannot clean install since it says there are no partitions to disk to use.

my theory then was that when i created the Ubuntu partition i have also created a boot partition for it, and i did not delete, so clearly it was interfering with Windows boot partition, so i have downloaded Partition Wizard, and saw that a partition with approximately 952 mb was labeled as "uboot", so i have deleted that, along with another "2.5GB" recovery for linux.

after that, voila! i could run EasyBCD and fix my bootmanager, or you can use another program called DualBootRepair, i ran both deleted the ubuntu entry and done a full repair on BCD and MBR.

and now i boot straight to windows 8.1 with no issues . i hope this help guys.

p.s: if you cannot boot at all to your windows, go to BIOS "hold F8 or f12 on startup" and change your boot method from UEFI to Legacy, this for some weird reason helped me boot to windows even with the errors.

 

[cjlindman]

I had the exact same issues/symptoms as the OP, down to a T, and was able to resolve the problem by disabling Intel Rapid Start from the BIOS. Immediately after that everything booted up fine.

 

[shubhamjain]

@xzeer i am also having same problem.

Hello guys, i think i just fixed it so i'll leave what i've done for future generations.

First, the problem started when i installed Ubuntu on dual boot with Windows 8.1 , then i've decided to delete Ubuntu by removing the partition and restored to secure boot, this has clearly screwed up my boot manager and created the exact same problem as with the original poster, Symptoms:

- Locked C:, so cannot refresh,reset,restore or any other
- Boot entries missing, whether in msconfig, EasyBCD, or any other program, so FixMBR is useless
- cannot clean install since it says there are no partitions to disk to use.

my theory then was that when i created the Ubuntu partition i have also created a boot partition for it, and i did not delete, so clearly it was interfering with Windows boot partition, so i have downloaded Partition Wizard, and saw that a partition with approximately 952 mb was labeled as "uboot", so i have deleted that, along with another "2.5GB" recovery for linux.

after that, voila! i could run EasyBCD and fix my bootmanager, or you can use another program called DualBootRepair, i ran both deleted the ubuntu entry and done a full repair on BCD and MBR.

and now i boot straight to windows 8.1 with no issues . i hope this help guys.

p.s: if you cannot boot at all to your windows, go to BIOS "hold F8 or f12 on startup" and change your boot method from UEFI to Legacy, this for some weird reason helped me boot to windows even with the errors.

@xzeer i am also having same problem.
what is partition wizard?
do i need to download it?
plz help!!!