Drive Where Windows is Installed is Locked

[alexdale94]

I upgraded to Windows 8.1 yesterday and I have been having trouble so I am trying to do a Refresh.
It says "the drive where windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again"
What is wrong? What do I do?

 

[dogday911]

Using windows 8 recovery disc or usb stick you can run repair commands to fix the boot record.
With bootrec.exe

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

as has been previously stated in this thread. I had to do it with a windows 10 install and it worked fine. Takes 5 minutes.

I upgraded to Windows 8.1 yesterday and I have been having trouble so I am trying to do a Refresh.
It says "the drive where windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again"
What is wrong? What do I do?

 

[Paul_200]

I had this problem, too. At first, I thought, oh no! Turns out my issue wasn't as serious some; and here's what I found. I followed some steps outlined in this thread, then stopped because nothing was helping. I gave some thought to this, and asked myself what could have changed in my system? Since the drive was "locked" and also being seen as RAW, this just made no sense whatsoever. I rebooted, immediately hit F12, checked my BIOS, and discovered that my RAID array was turned off! What? I checked the battery. Duh! It was dead, and the BIOS simply forgot the settings. I installed a new battery, I turned the RAID array back on, and BOOM! Everything works! The point of my response is to help remind everyone to stop and think things through before you panic and try a lot of potentially unnecessary steps. When in doubt, start with the basics! Hopefully, you too will experience a simple solution for your system!

That was exactly what was wrong with my system. Battery needed replaced, had to switch RAID back on for each drive in the BIOS. Many thanks for the tip!

 

[Peter_176]

from my understanding, a lot of people have had this problem.
following the steps in this link should fix it, if not, let us know.

http/www.boyans.net/RepairWindows/The_drive_where_Windows_is_installed_is_locked.html

Looked good , but when I try to run chkdsk I get message "Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is write protected". When I try scannow I get " Windows resource protection could not perform the requested operation." Any ideas?

 

[ronb22999]

If you are using PCIE SSD, below can be found the data recovery solution, because no other solution works. Tried so many, too many actually.



1.) Insert a spare drive in your PC.

2.) Run the clean installation of win 8 on that drive.

3.) When logging into Win for the first time, install the PCIE SSD drivers.

4.) Run "chkdsk F: /f". F: denotes your PCIE SSD drive after its driver installation. It could be another drive letter.

5.) Now if you use Command Prompt you can see the files on the PCIE SSD. If you use Eplorer it will not be possible.

6.) Find a good recovery program to recover the data on the external drive. Or if you know DOS commands use those.

7.) Clean install win 8 on PCIE SSD and format the old spare drive.



Microsoft really did a "great" job. Yesterday my PC was working just fine. Today I turned it on I saw only the black screen with white cursor in the top left corner after the BIOS screen. F8 command did not work. Win 8 installation cd neither. It has lousy support for PCIE SSDs. Luckily I could get my data back, otherwise ...



What is worse they are trying to disguise it as virus when it was the Win Update which shabanged everything.

 

[ronb22999]

where is the "spare drive ???

 

[sirstoffe]

Brilliant!
I had error code 0xd000000d on startup and the SSD was locked as described above, but when typing these three commands in the cmd (accessing it by using the windows 8.1 cd) it completely solved the problem! Thanks!! =)

all else fails you can run repair commands to fix the boot record

with bootrec.exe

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

This was my fix, using the USB recovery disc. Nice and painless and thank you!!!

 

[warbd]

These commands just fixed my Windows 10 system. Thanks!!!!

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

you might want to run diskpart.exe as a admin
and see if your disk or partition has been marked as read only.

start cmd.exe as a admin
diskpart.exe
list disk
select disk 0 <----------- from the output of the previous command
attributes disk <-------- displays the attributes of that drive

see if it is marked as readonly
here is what mine shows:
DISKPART> attributes disk
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No

if it is not marked readonly i would check the partition tables attrbutes

list volume
seclect volume 2 <-------- this is my windows drive
attributes volume <---------this will dump your volume info

here is what mine looks like:

DISKPART> attributes volume
Read-only : No
Hidden : No
No Default Drive Letter: No
Shadow Copy : No

again you are looking for it being marked as readonly.

if they are marked readonly you can clear the attribute

all else fails you can run repair commands to fix the boot record

with bootrec.exe

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

sorry if this seems complex, it is just a shame to have to wipe a drive for this problem

 

[Incog_Nito_of_Toms_Hardware]

upgraded to 8.1 yesterday and I have been having troubles so I am trying to do a Refresh.
Says "the drive where windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again"
What is wrong? what do I do?

my impasse was because, Under Bios, under Advanced, i had the CSM setting.
I switched it to UEFI and it was then that I didn't get the "Drive where windows is installed is locked"

I can confirm that switching the BIOS setting to EUFI worked for me as well. It may or may not look exactly the way described above. Mine didn't. In my case, I switched from "Legacy" to "EUFI" and Windows 10 then booted perfectly.

SOLVED!

 

[Incog_Nito_of_Toms_Hardware]

UEFI*

 

[coltomw]

you might want to run diskpart.exe as a admin
and see if your disk or partition has been marked as read only.

start cmd.exe as a admin
diskpart.exe
list disk
select disk 0 <----------- from the output of the previous command
attributes disk <-------- displays the attributes of that drive

see if it is marked as readonly
here is what mine shows:
DISKPART> attributes disk
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No

if it is not marked readonly i would check the partition tables attrbutes

list volume
seclect volume 2 <-------- this is my windows drive
attributes volume <---------this will dump your volume info

here is what mine looks like:

DISKPART> attributes volume
Read-only : No
Hidden : No
No Default Drive Letter: No
Shadow Copy : No

again you are looking for it being marked as readonly.

if they are marked readonly you can clear the attribute

all else fails you can run repair commands to fix the boot record

with bootrec.exe

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

sorry if this seems complex, it is just a shame to have to wipe a drive for this problem

I've done all of this but it reads back to me: Total identified Windows instalations: 0 The operation completed successfully.

I'm unable to perform a restart aside from powering it off and turning it back on, any suggestions? At this point if i habe to wipe it i would be okay with that but i am unable to do that as it says that the partition is missing.