BSOD due to locked HDD

[Grizzly232]

I wasn't sure whether to post this under the BSOD forum, or the hardware forum considering that it involves both. I've been handed my cousin's laptop after it wouldn't boot up properly at all, and I've done about two hours of investigation and came to a few conclusions.

The BSOD is due to an inaccessible boot device. There aren't any other boot devices or devices in general attached right now. After I ran chkdsk, the HDD seemed to be completely fine, which was strange. So then I tried resetting the PC through the recovery menu, after which I was hit with two different messages.

"The drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again."
"Unable to reset your PC. A required drive partition is missing."

So apparently the drive is locked, which is caused by many different things. Malware, although I have no way of confirming that since I can't boot the laptop. Corrupt system files, which are supposedly meant to appear if you run sfc /scannow. Although whenever I run that, I'm hit with a "Windows resource protection could not start the repair service."

Either way, if the HDD was locked, then it stands to reason that it would be an inaccessible as a boot device. The only problem is that I've never encountered a "locked" HDD before, and I've got no idea how to go about "unlocking" it.

 

[samuria]

Welcome to the forum. Have you got an install DVD boot from that and run repair. We really need to see the partitions on the drive as it suggest one is missing you can get free bootable partition software that will show that some may be able to check drive and remove lock