A possible solution for Windows 10 upgrades going awry with 0xc000000f

[mikeymikec]

Admittedly the scenario I encountered on a customer's computer is IMO quite unusual (though the implications of it might be worth considering when other people troubleshoot the issue) but I'll describe the problem first.

The laptop originally shipped with Windows 8.x, Ivy Bridge hardware and aside from switchable graphics, nothing terribly unusual about the hardware. It's not a major laptop manufacturer; the company that the customer mentioned is a) one I've never heard of and b) isn't written on the laptop itself (I don't remember the name either). The laptop ended up with Windows 10 somewhere along the way as a result of the free upgrade offer.

Since then, the laptop has crashed badly twice and on both occasions it was directly after a major Windows update (upgrading to version 1607, then later it happened again for the 1703 update). The symptoms were identical on each occasion: 0xc000000f BSOD on boot ("a required device is inaccessible" IIRC), and I found through the recovery console that the main Windows partition wasn't recognised as NTFS. Running chkdsk /f on it reports that the boot sector was corrupted and the backup boot sector will be used to restore it, then the partition is accessible yet the OS is in such a bad state that I've found nothing that will resurrect the Windows installation. Three OS boot choices were presented for repair (and repairing each one does not help): "Windows Rollback", "Windows.old" and "Windows". Neither of the other two have a reasonably complete Windows installation in their folder structures, no system restore either, IMO you're basically screwed. A Windows 'reset' may help here, I think it's what I did the first time I encountered this problem on only this laptop. One thing that makes it even more fun to diagnose is that every time one attempts to boot the OS, the main data partition's boot sector gets corrupted again.

The first time around, after doing a full chkdsk and giving the laptop a thorough check-up after (IIRC) resetting Windows, I assumed Windows had somehow borked the upgrade procedure but as a freak incident.

This time around made me think it was more than that. Identical symptoms as before. I advised the customer that while the only evidence points at a possibly faulty disk, both a full chkdsk and the SMART data don't concur. He needed a bigger disk anyway (it wasn't full but it was getting there, about 100GB to go), so I put in a new one. As I was installing with 1607 media, it then wanted to do the 1703 update immediately, which immediately caused the same old problem.

The reason for the problem was apparently this:

The BIOS was reporting that 'Secure Boot' was enabled, and while I didn't immediately see an option for UEFI, I assumed that if Secure Boot is enabled, so must UEFI be. Apparently you can set this BIOS up to not boot in UEFI mode but to have secure boot enabled, and I'm not particularly surprised that Windows might not particularly like that. What really surprises me though is that I would have thought that attempts to install Windows 10 would go similarly awry, not just major updates.

 

[Ketchup]

Good tip. My only question would be why you didn't go ahead and install 10 with 1703 instead if messing with an older build followed by a major update immediately after install.

 

[mikeymikec]

Good tip. My only question would be why you didn't go ahead and install 10 with 1703 instead if messing with an older build followed by a major update immediately after install.

I have a retail USB drive with 1607 on, so that's what I generally use (and normally I'm installing to SSDs so a major update is just a small delay). Furthermore I wouldn't have been able to test for this issue

IMO, especially when dealing with a new build or laptop it's a good thing not to streamline the installation process too much because the more work the computer has to do, then the more testing it's being put through. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I worked in an office where the computer in question isn't too far away if it did have problems that escaped my initial notice during setup, but on the other hand even in an office you've then got the user breathing down your neck for a quick solution as well as maybe their boss.