David Bakin’s programming blog.

Failed EFI boot with 0xC000000F and missing winload.efi, running native

(Updated: )
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Did you just get a Windows boot failure

  • on an EFI boot machine
  • missing file \Windows\System32\winload.efi
  • error code 0xC000000F
  • when you are running native (boot from VHD, VHDX)
  • and just deleted a differencing disk
  • but did not first delete the BCD entry that referred to the differencing disk?

If so … boot from a Windows setup USB stick/DVD/whatever, and use BCDEDIT to delete the boot entry that still refers to the differencing disk. Then you’re good to go.

Apparently with a sufficiently bad entry in the BCD store you get a nasty catastrophic failure and don’t even get a choice to boot from one of the other installed operating systems. But don’t succumb to a heart attack. Correct it by booting from a different device (setting the BIOS boot order if necessary) and deleting the bad entry in the BCD.

(By the way, this superuser/stackoverflow page would have been a real help fixing more “normal” EFI boot problems if I hadn’t borked my machine in a particularly stupid way.)