My laptop recently broke down due to some hardware problems related to the motherboard. To restore my working environment, I plugged out the SSD drive where the operating system is installed and connected it to another computer through a USB SSD hard drive adapter.
I first tried booting directly from it, but the boot process stuck. Then I tried adding this external operating system to the windows boot manager(the new computer has its own Windows installed), but it failed again with a blue screen:
Your PC/Device needs to be repaired
The application or operating system couldn't be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors.
File: \Windows\System32\winload.efi
Error code: 0xc000000e
So I googled this error code for solutions and found this post.
I then tried all solutions in it, including running automatic repairment, enabling legacy boot, disabling ELAM, running system file check, restoring ESP partition from Windows folder, rebuilding BCD and MBR using bootrec
, and none of those solutions worked - They all ended up with the same blue screen code.
But the most wired thing is that the system could always boot successfully on my broken laptop when the SSD is plugged in its original slot(though it has a hardware problem, it's intermittent, which means it still works fine sometimes). The reason I emphasized the condition "in its original slot" is that I've also tried attaching it through the USB adapter and booting, and it failed as well.
So, all my attempts lead to a ridiculous conclusion: the system in this SSD drive seems to bind with that specific slot.
So, may anyone explain what the hell is happening? Or provide some more solutions that I haven't tried yet?
Here is some additional information:
- Model of my broken laptop: Lenovo Legion Y7000 2019
- Operating System: Windows 10 Professional 21H1
- It's an M.2 NVMe SSD drive
- There's no problem with the SSD drive itself, I've performed a health check already.
- When using
bootrec
in safe mode,/FixBoot
always failed with the messageAccess denied
. - BitLocker is disabled
Well, I've just learned that Windows has a feature related to such a scenario: Windows To Go.
So, is this feature enabled by default on a standard Windows system? Or there are some crucial differences between a portable Windows and a standard one, which might be the root cause of the problem I'm facing?
If that's the case, is there any approach that could turn the Windows in my SSD into a Windows To Go Workspace?
\Windows\System32\winload.efi
exist on the disk and can be used (test by copying elsewhere)?