Windows 10: Hard drive locked trying a Win 10 repair

I have an ASUS laptop which came with Win 8, upgraded to Win 8.1 then upgraded to Win 10. Had a problem of rebooting unexpectedly. Restore did not help. Having problems getting a rescue disk to boot up ( ASUS bios is a bit odd to set up for CD/DVD boot ) so decided to do a repair as I have an original Win 10 usb installation stick and when it booted up I tried to do a repair. But it came back as unable to do a repair as hard drive is locked! what does this mean.

I have run a program that has given me my activation code and was wondering if I reinstalled Win 10 do I use this activation code or just reinstall and bypass activation code!

Thanks Bob

:)

 

hard drive locked windows 10

There is no switch on a hard drive or other method that physically locks it. Any error received that the drive is locked is generated because it is viewed as locked by Windows. But Windows has absolutely no say over what you can do with the hard drive
from Boot Mode, hence fixes given for a "Locked Drive" include to boot into repair media to run

Startup Repair, a full
Disk Check , manually run the bootrec/bootsect repair commands (automated in Startup Repair), try further repairs using web fixes such as

Fix - The drive where Windows is installed is locked,



unlock hard drive - Windows 10 Forums



Windows crash - Refresh - Hard drive locked, unlock hard drive - Microsoft Community,

The drive where Windows is installed is locked Windows 10

Solved Hard drive locked trying a Win 10 repair - Windows 10 Forums or to just wipe all partitions to

Clean Install Windows 10 .

More discussion about this is here at
Drive Where Windows is Installed is Locked - Windows - Off-Topic / General Discussion

Since the OP had the Upgrade I was giving him the shortest likely method to recover it by wiping the drive to

Clean Install Windows 10 which clears the boot sector at issue in the error while providing a much better install than the Upgrade. The Clean Install in the link has been done by tens of thousands of consumers here without a single complaint, while we
still get problems posted about Upgrade and factory installs every few minutes.

Additional repair options are here including everything possible for
Troubleshooting Windows 8 and 10 Failure to Start - Microsoft Community. One of these repairs almost always works for locked drives because the drive is not really physically locked.

As both Wiki's explain one can also at any time rescue files which are not properly backed up using bootable media following

Rescue Files when Windows Won't Start.

I hope this helps clarify this better for those who find this issue in searches.

 

Windows 10 won't reinstall

Start in Windows 10 safemode. Save all your data to a usb. When you format a hard drive it erases all data.

As mentioned earlier consider letting the hard drive mfg's repair software repair the hard drive.

Then reinstall with Win 10 formatting also.

 

Hi.
Once W10 has been installed and activated on a machine, it can be clean-installed as often as you like/need, and it will auto-activate based on the signature on the MS servers, so no key needed.

The issue of the "locked" HDD may be due to Fast Startup being enabled.

I'm not sure if there is any way to get into a system that won't boot, and turn Fast Startup off, so a clean install is probably your best bet. Being as how your machine was upgraded a couple of times, it probably has a lot of partitions on there leftover from the previous installations. I would recommend clean installing to an unallocated drive, so you can get rid of the partition mess.

Select Custom Install (see step 10) and delete all your partitions.

Windows 10 - Clean Install - Windows 10 Forums

I would also get a copy of the latest install media from MS, if you have access to another computer (but it's not absolutely necessary).

Hope that helps.

p.s. - Once the new installation is complete, turn off Fast Startup and turn on System Restore. *Wink

 

Thanks, Now I am waiting for Win 10 anniversary to install, another set of bugs to iron out!

Thanks again Bob

 

Quite welcome. Once you're up and running, you can mark the thread as solved. Cheers!