Windows 10 installation not booting following an unidentified bluescreen and attempted windows update, initially unable to load anything past an error screen saying “Your PC/Device needs to be repaired. A required device isn’t connected or can’t be accessed. Error code: 0xc000000e”, occasionally sourcing windowssystem32winload.exe as the missing/problematic file. Options below were to try booting again, enter startup settings, or use a different operating system. Trying to boot again or enter startup settings would simply flash the screen, and loading a different operating system only worked after installing a new version of windows on a seperate drive and using the boot manager from the installation media. The windows installation in question was then cloned sector by sector from the 128gb SSD it was on to a 2tb SSD from the fresh installation of windows, along with the windows setup environment as an installation media. The sfc, bootrec, and dism commands could not initally do anything to change the situation, sometimes identifying a problem and trying to fix it, sometimes identifying that nothing could be done from windows resource protection, and sometimes not identifying any problem or installation of windows at all. I initially thought it could be an issue with windows falling back on files for loading windows from a drive with an MBR on a drive with a GPT boot sector, but after replacing the winload.efi file, winload.exe, and eventually the entire boot sector of that drive, I gave up chasing that specific issue. Following a clean clone of the drive, I used DISM to restore the image to a version matched ISO file (10.0.19045.4239) and bootrec to fix some boot issue, I finally got another BSOD with stop code 0xc000021a, and was then returned to the 0xc000000e error screen with five options, to boot again, enter a recovery environment, enter startup settings, go to my BIOS for UEFI firmware settings, or try to use another operating system. Booting again yielded nothing, I couldn’t enter the recovery environment from the problematic drive, I had been in and out of my BIOS changing around boot orders and settings to work around this before, but the startup settings finally loaded. Safe mode wouldn’t boot and returned to the start of the loop, and the last thing I’d read said disabling driver signature enforcement fixed the issue for someone with a very similar issue, so I tried that, and its been booting for about 4 days now.

The conclusion’s I’ve reached so far are, its not a hardware issue of the drive (no bad sectors, exact same behavior after cloning the drive), the issue doesn’t appear to be in the boot sector (error screens present so far have been in that infuriating windows blue and pass atleast into loading some part of windows), this installation cannot fix itself (sfc/bootrec/dism have been unable to do anything without being provided a clean image), and it doesn’t appear to be some sort of registry issue (the file system of the original drive is entirely intact, all files and folders are accessible and seemingly unchanged, I would’ve just cloned the drive thru file explorer if I didnt have to wait for a takeown operation to run on every single windows system file before changing security settings on all of those folders)

I am just about out of the ideas, and would love to hear anything other than questions about why I want this bootable instead of just taking files I need and building a new installation (it involves itunes and a few other bitchy programs).