Urgent help - locked windows drive

[itsonlysmellz]

Ran a live distribution of Linux and rebooted to get back on Windows 10. Stuck boot with a black screen and blinking cursor. I think I broke the MBR.

Ran a Windows repair disk and when trying to refresh my PC it says the drive windows is installed on is locked. Only able to get in to CMD.

Ran bootrec /fixboot (element not found) , /rebuildbcd /fixmbr and nothing has worked.

Any input would be cherished.

 

[Colif]

this might help: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/the-drive-where-windows-is-installed-is-locked

 

[GamingInsider]

If that article doesn't help. Try following boozi's post in the comments, copied here for you.

uninformed post and comments,

most new pc's running win 8 are using efi(or UEFI) boot with gpt "partitioned" drives. (as opposed to the old bios+MBR) this method does not have or use an "active partition" function as a part of the boot process.

BIOS v EFI (still often referred to as "uefi bios")
MBR v GPT

the first comment is a case of a GPT drive: (MBR drives can only contain 4 partitions)

partition 1 "system"(300MB) is an efi partition which is the first on the boot process and it contains the bootmgr and BCD files(windows boot program)
all other partitions except 4 and 6 are repair and recovery tools both built in to windows and added by the vendor.

from a "superuser" post:
I've spent a lot of time trying to get my Windows 8 PC to boot again after cloning to a new SSD and try to summarise how I finally got it all working -

Firstly, boot from a UEFI Windows 8 recovery disk (CD/DVD/USB) - I found that the automated recovery process didn't find the correct Windows partition, nor when I managed to add it to BCD settings would it make it reliably bootable e.g. using BCDEDIT I got it to find and launch the Windows partition but it refused to cold boot or would not "keep" the settings after a 2nd reboot or power off.

Go into the Advanced options and run the Command Prompt.

Enter diskpart to use the DiskPart tool to ensure you have all the right partitions and to identify your EFI partition - the key thing here is that your EFI partition is formatted as FAT32:

DISKPART> sel disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list vol

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 E DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 C NTFS Partition 195 GB Healthy Boot
Volume 2 WINRE NTFS Partition 400 MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 3 FAT32 Partition 260 MB Healthy System

Then assign a drive letter to the EFI partition:

DISKPART> sel vol 3

Volume 3 is the selected volume.

DISKPART> assign letter=b:

DiskPart successfully assigned the drive letter or mount point.

Exit DiskPart tool by entering exit and at the command prompt run the following:

cd /d b:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\

bootrec /fixboot

Delete or rename the BCD file:

ren BCD BCD.bak

Use bcdboot.exe to recreate BCD store:

bcdboot c:\Windows /l en-gb /s b: /f ALL

The /f ALL parameter updates the BIOS settings including UEFI firmware/NVRAM, /l en-gb is to localise for UK/GB locale. The localisation defaults to US English, or use en-US.

Reboot and cross your fingers.

This gave me headaches. I was going in circles for a long while. There isn't a lot of reliable info about fixing UEFI/Windows 8 at the time of writing.

[EDIT]

To re-enable Hyper-V, I also had to run the following from an Administrator Command Prompt within Windows after rebooting:

bcdedit /set {default} hypervisorlaunchtype Auto
bcdedit /set {default} nx OptIn