Installing windows on a separate drive almost bricks main windows, solved it.

SilentBell · February 3, 2023

I will do my best to write this out as coherent and understandable as possible for those that run into this issue in the future.

Issue:

PC won't boot windows, get error code 0xc00000e
Trying automatical startup repair gets me: C/Windows/system32/logfiles/srt/srtTrail.txt

This is NOT a tutorial how to fix the actual issue causing those error codes, they turned out to be a symptom of a different issue. So unless you did the following to cause that, what I will do next is probably not your solution, tread carefully.

The cause: I wanted to install windows on a new SSD for a PC, I didn't want to lug all my equipment (monitor, keyboard, mouse) to it and install directly on the PC. So I put it into my main PC (yes, I am a magnet for dumb ideas) and started the windows install on the new SSD as normal. But here's the most important bit:

After the usual initial windows install and the first shutdown, it restarts back up on the thumb drive "install windows" window. I thought it might've failed so I tried again and it goes off without a hitch, fresh windows is up.

The problem: Shutting down the PC, I take out the SSD, and boot my PC, I am promptly presented with (refer to issues section) errors.

I tried the following:

(I'll just post links to videos and articles I followed to no avail.)

https://youtu.be/ZZBOdeTF5Iw

https://www.makeuseof.com/fix-windows-10-error-code-0xc00000e/#:~:text=But the error code 0xc00000e,system files are usually stored.

https://softwarekeep.com/help-center/fix-fixboot-access-is-denied-windows

Pre Solution:

(skip a bit further down for what I did)

There was a new recovery partition in my main SSD, I often try new dumb things and break things so I frequent the partitions on my drive and there was most definitely only ONE (1) windows recovery partition. Very suspicious. I actually found this almost immediately into the problem so I googled what would happen if I deleted recovery. Many articles said it was common to have more than one recovery and deleting them is bad. I didn't actually want to break windows beyond repair so I took all (refer to "I tried the following" section) the steps I could think of to get it working and nothing worked.

Solution: The new recovery partition only had like 25mb used out of 500+mb allotted to it while the other one had 600ish out of 650ish mb. Using the windows install media, at the "choose drive to install windows" I deleted the recovery partition.

Post solution: I fully expected the same results as before, infact I thought I actually broke windows and it won't boot into error at all. But lo n behold, windows loads like I didn't just spend 2 days trouble shooting it.

My final thoughts and reasoning to issue:

I think that I may have selected an old partition I made with a different project to install windows. Although I am very sure I chose the correct drive. And it tried to install on that, after rebooting it booted into the thumb drive from boot priority. I then selected the correct drive and things went fine.

Windows ended up making only a small part of the full system on the main SSD, trying to boot into my regular windows it would choose the "infant" everytime, and because it wasn't actually functional, it errored out, and because it wasn't complete, any attempts at rebuilding windows didn't work.

I am mainly posting this for myself and for others that have this exact very Niche issue.

Thanks for reading and I hope I helped