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

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

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.

To understand what this is/does (it was first introduced in Windows 8):
“Fast Startup (aka: hybrid boot or hybrid Shutdown) is a new feature in Windows 8 to help your PC start up faster after shutting down. When turned on, Windows 8 does this by using a hybrid shutdown (a partial hibernate) method that saves only the kernel session and device drivers (system information) to the hibernate (hiberfil.sys) file on disk instead of closing it when you shut down your PC. This also makes the hiberfil.sys file to be much smaller than what hibernate would use (often 4GB or more). When you start your PC again, Windows 8 uses that saved system information to resume your system instead of having to do a cold boot to fully restart it. Using this technique with boot gives a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems tested). If you have a motherboard with UEFI, then fast startup will be even faster.”

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 blog

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.

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

Thanks again Bob

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!