Windows 10: Winload.efi "missing or corrupt". Cannot load Windows 10. Cannot use recovery tools. Help!

Hello. I have a serious issue and could use some help resolving it.

I recently shut down my PC normally in order to restart it after connecting a USB device while my system was off. All I did was shut down my PC using the start menu shutdown function.

When I pressed the power button to boot up as normal, I saw the Windows loading screen come up on my display with the Windows logo and the rotating dots as normal. However the screen just continued to stay there with the dots continuously animating for way longer than it should have. My system typically boots into the Windows 10 login screen within about 10 seconds or less. The loading screen just stayed like that for a good 3 or 4 minutes before I finally got tired of waiting and just shut down the PC by holding down the power button. Anyway, long story short after getting this never ending loading screen multiple times I finally got an error screen saying something about Winload.efi being "missing or corrupt".

This is the first time I've seen this error after using Windows 10 for several years. I tried to boot into Safe mode but every time I tried to do that the first thing that would happen is the screen would momentarily flash with the menu. And then go black and stay black. I could not see the recovery menu options because of that. That would happen multiple times in a row. A few times I would see a recovery menu that gave me options to either go into a "recovery environment" or escape into UEFI settings or something like that. (I'm trying to remember this stuff from memory because my PC is currently disassembled in order to allow me to get at my boot NVMe drive so I can't double check what the screens said).

Anyway none of the recovery options I could see whenever the system would allow me to see them did not do anything at all when I selected them. I literally tried pressing enter on every single option and nothing happened. So I tried to use the Windows Installation USB media tool that I created a while back. But when I tried to load that up, all I saw was a blank purple/blue screen with no prompt or any Window or anything. Just a blank screen. So I figured I'd try to create a brand new Windows Installation USB tool. I used a spare laptop (which is what I'm using to type all this right now) to recreate a new USB tool. When I tried to load that, the same thing keeps happening. Blank colored screen. I don't know why this isn't working but I cannot use any type of recovery tool in order to try and repair my existing Windows 10 OS installation.

Since I can't seem to get any sort of recovery tool working on my PC anymore, I decided I'll try and reinstall Windows again. However, I need to backup my Documents folder on my boot drive. So I just tried to remove my boot drive and connect it to my laptop in order to transfer the data from that drive to another one through my laptop. However, I cannot access that boot drive as it is listed as "invalid" in my laptop Disk Management tool. I recently converted all of my originally basic drives to dynamic in my desktop system, including the boot drive in order to get my system into full UEFI mode. I didn't realize by doing that if something were to go wrong with my boot drive that I would not be able to access it with another system. The data is very important to me and I don't want to lose it.

How can I either get my recovery tools to work properly on my system so I can repair my OS installation and do whatever is necessary to fix that winload.efi file problem so I can boot back into my dekstop Windows 10 OS installation, or gain access to my invalid boot drive dynamic disk using another system in order to back up my documents folder files? Any help would be appreciated. I'm in dire need of fixing this asap. I really don't want to have to reinstall Windows as I've spent the last several days getting my system set up the way I want it. The thought of losing several days of software installations and setting up of my software settings is infuriating to me. I'd really like to know how shutting down my system could have caused this to happen. And why it's so difficult for me to simply run my Windows recovery USB drive properly. I really don't understand why any of this is happening. It makes no sense to me at all.

submitted by /u/am1sf1t
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:)

 

Which tool to recover the EFI partition? Booted into Rescue Disk

That's not what they suggest here:

FIX: Steps to Fix Winload.EFI Error - Appuals.com

Winload.EFI Error, is pretty much self explanatory by it’s name is an error that prevents windows from loading. This is usually caused by corrupt boot records or incorrect boot configuration. Depending on your Operating System, the error message may vary but the keyword winload.efi will be same. On a Windows 8/8.1/10 system, the error usually pops-up in the following form.

 

winload efi missing or corrupt

I recommend you go to a working computer, download and create a Surface Recovery Image, then use it to reinstall Windows 10 on your Surface:

Step 1:

Microsoft Support | Download a recovery image for Microsoft Surface

Step 2:

Creating and using a USB recovery drive - Microsoft Support

Step 3: instructions how to install it:

How to download and install a recovery image for your Microsoft ...

 

Windows boot winload efi error 0000e9

hi my acer swift ryzen laptop completly crashed the weekend with the winload efi error .

ive gone into bios and disabled secure boot in uefi but no result . Ive managed to download windows 10 on usb drive and set it up in bios to boot from that drive however i still get the same blue window as before even tho the usb is top of the boot list.
I want to go into advanced options but it doesnt appear on the blue screen and now mot sure what to do . Any help would be great , i dont want to wipe the machine if possible