Hi, I have a Win7 install that I had not used since January since I was testing Win10 (on a separate drive)
The Win7 install is a dual boot where XP x64 resides on a 300GB Cheetah drive connected to a RAID controller.
Since it's the boot drive it has the Win7 boot manager on it, including the C:\BOOT directory for Win7 and C:\NTLDR for XP x64
Win7 resides on a 4TB RAID5 array and shows up as drive D: when Windows has finished booting.
I booted it up for the first time since January, applied all 60 Windows updates and when I rebooted I was greeted with the error: winload.exe 0xc0000098 "File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe"
"Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt"
Pressing "F8" on the boot menu for Win7 just raised the same error message.
So I fired up my Win7 SP1 DVD and ran a chkdsk for both drives C: and D: but it did not fix anything.
Next I tried bootrec /ScanOs & /RebuildBcd but it found no missing entries.
So I tried /FixMbr & /FixBoot and rebooted but it made no difference.
Next I tried to run an offline sfc scan, but it could not continue due to pending operations.
So I renamed the file D:\Windows\WinSxS\Pending.xml and that allowed me to continue.
To be on the safe side I ran it in "verify mode": sfc /verifyonly /offbootdir=C:\ /offwindir=D:\Windows
But it found no corrupted files.
Next I renamed the C:\BOOT\BCD file and created a new one using bootrec, but this also did not help.
Finally I replaced the D:\Windows\system32\winload.exe with a copy stored in D:\Windows\WinSxS\Backup and this did change the behavior:
Instead of 0xc0000098 I got error: 0xc0000428 "Info: Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this file."
With the new winload.exe pressing "F8" actually worked and so I selected the option "disable driver signature enforcement" which then got me a little further in the boot process: now ntoskrnl.exe raised error 0xc0000098 instead.
But replacing that one with the backup in D:\Windows\WinSxS\Backup did not change the behavior at all, and this is where I'm at now
The Win7 install is a dual boot where XP x64 resides on a 300GB Cheetah drive connected to a RAID controller.
Since it's the boot drive it has the Win7 boot manager on it, including the C:\BOOT directory for Win7 and C:\NTLDR for XP x64
Win7 resides on a 4TB RAID5 array and shows up as drive D: when Windows has finished booting.
I booted it up for the first time since January, applied all 60 Windows updates and when I rebooted I was greeted with the error: winload.exe 0xc0000098 "File: \Windows\system32\winload.exe"
"Info: The selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt"
Pressing "F8" on the boot menu for Win7 just raised the same error message.
So I fired up my Win7 SP1 DVD and ran a chkdsk for both drives C: and D: but it did not fix anything.
Next I tried bootrec /ScanOs & /RebuildBcd but it found no missing entries.
So I tried /FixMbr & /FixBoot and rebooted but it made no difference.
Next I tried to run an offline sfc scan, but it could not continue due to pending operations.
So I renamed the file D:\Windows\WinSxS\Pending.xml and that allowed me to continue.
To be on the safe side I ran it in "verify mode": sfc /verifyonly /offbootdir=C:\ /offwindir=D:\Windows
But it found no corrupted files.
Next I renamed the C:\BOOT\BCD file and created a new one using bootrec, but this also did not help.
Finally I replaced the D:\Windows\system32\winload.exe with a copy stored in D:\Windows\WinSxS\Backup and this did change the behavior:
Instead of 0xc0000098 I got error: 0xc0000428 "Info: Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this file."
With the new winload.exe pressing "F8" actually worked and so I selected the option "disable driver signature enforcement" which then got me a little further in the boot process: now ntoskrnl.exe raised error 0xc0000098 instead.
But replacing that one with the backup in D:\Windows\WinSxS\Backup did not change the behavior at all, and this is where I'm at now