Windows 10 Not Booting After Drive Clone

An SSD was failing, and the cloning process did not go well. When I tried booting from the drive, it immediately failed with a generic Error code of 0xc000000e.

Solution:

Boot from a Windows installation USB or Disk.

Enter the troubleshooting menu and open the Command Prompt.

Ensure the boot drive is not an MBR disk by going through this series of commands. Hit enter after each one.

diskpart

select disk 0

list partition

This should result in a list of partitions. Select your primary partition.

select partition 4

active

This may result in a message saying “The ACTIVE command can only be used on fixed MBR disks.” If that is the case type

exit

So if that is the case, we can switch to a different strategy. Check to see if drive C is your Windows drive by entering

c:

and then

dir

You should see a list of folders that include Windows and Users. If you don’t, try looking at drive D or E.

If drive C is your drive, type

bcdboot c:\windows

If you get the message that the boot files have been successfully created, you can try booting to Windows. If it is a different drive, substitute that drive letter in the previous command.