ntoskrnl.exe missing or corrupt, new install on a clean drive

[mackemforever]

So, this is a problem that has me properly stumped.

Earlier today I decided to reinstall Windows 10 because quite frankly it was resembling far too much of my life, and by that I mean incredibly disorganised, clutter everywhere and full of things that I had no need for!

Anyway, did the usual, burned the .iso over to a memory stick, booted to it, ran through the setup process but this is where the problems started. Immediately after I'd formatted my drive and created a new partition for the new installation I had a power cut. When I started up again I was getting the error from the title of this topic, that Ntoskrnl.exe was missing or corrupt. It gave me a number of options, various versions of safe mode and other assorted choices, all of which are useless as they need a completed installation of Windows to work.

So I thought it might be a problem with the drive, but I've swapped in a different drive with no effect. I thought it might be a problem with the USB drive but I've tried a different drive with no effect. It might have been the iso was corrupted but I've redownloaded it and tried with a Windows 7 iso and have had the same problem.

So in short I have absolutely no idea what is going on or how to fix it so I need to turn to the wonderful knowledgeable people on here for help.

Thanks everybody.

 

[Colif]

This error can be caused by various of factors, like:

1. Corrupt boot volume, which may happen due to unsafe shutdown, sudden power loss, unsafe removal of a local or external disk or physical disk damage or corruption.
2. Failed Windows update or virus infection results in Ntoskrnl.exe corruption or deletion.
3. Invalid boot.ini configuration.
4. Windows has no the necessary drivers to access Windows system files on your main partition.

1. You had power loss during one install but not 2nd. Have you tried running chkdsk /f on the drives?
2. its a fresh install
3. unlikely on 2 different hdd
4. its a fresh install on a PC it worked on before... you could look to see if any new BIOS. Could try resetting BIOS but not sure it would help.

Was windows 10 previously fresh installed on hdd or was it an upgrade from 7/8?

Can't say I have seen this before.

 

[mackemforever]

This error can be caused by various of factors, like:

1. Corrupt boot volume, which may happen due to unsafe shutdown, sudden power loss, unsafe removal of a local or external disk or physical disk damage or corruption.
2. Failed Windows update or virus infection results in Ntoskrnl.exe corruption or deletion.
3. Invalid boot.ini configuration.
4. Windows has no the necessary drivers to access Windows system files on your main partition.

1. You had power loss during one install but not 2nd. Have you tried running chkdsk /f on the drives?
2. its a fresh install
3. unlikely on 2 different hdd
4. its a fresh install on a PC it worked on before... you could look to see if any new BIOS. Could try resetting BIOS but not sure it would help.

Was windows 10 previously fresh installed on hdd or was it an upgrade from 7/8?

Can't say I have seen this before.

I had no easy way of running a chkdsk, I literally couldn't even get into command prompt!

Anyway, I actually managed to work around the problem in the end so I'll run through what I did, because it really bugs me when I see people with this kind of obscure problem who has said they've solved it but haven't said how!

First thing was to create a bootable WinPE drive, in this case I used Win10PE SE available through the guys at theoven.org because it's a prebuilt ISO complete with a lot of very useful tools already set up.

So after booting to that I ran a couple of tests on my drive, all of which came back fine, so then created the necessary partitions with diskpart, pretty much following the set of commands shown here.

I was then able to install Windows 10 on that drive using WinNTSetup and after a reboot it booted straight up into the final stage of the Windows 10 setup process.



The really strange thing however is that it's booting perfectly fine, windows itself is running perfectly fine but just to see what would happen I created a new bootable Windows 10 USB stick this morning and as soon as it started to boot from that it dumped me back to the same error screen I was having previously!

So in conclusion, I have absolutely no bloody idea what's going on, why I'm getting the ntoskrnl.exe error only when I try to boot into the Windows 10 USB drive or why it's working perfectly otherwise!

 

[Colif]

Even though you had no idea how it fixed it, you got a solution and if anyone else has same problem, it might help them as well

 

[s.vaningelgem]

I know this is a belated answer, but I got here when I had exactly the same issue.
After trying to install Win10Pro several times and always failing at different steps, I tried checking the memory (DDR4's were in bank 1&2), I saw I had a TON of memory errors.
Switching to (less) faulty memory solved my issue.

 

[Staticadik]

I solved this issue on an older HP laptop by going to the bios boot menu and selecting F11 Repair computer. apparently they must of limited the access to the kernel and who knows what else pre-boot. Easily negated but a stupid problem. hope this helps someone else.

 

[Nhan72nn]

I have the same problem with nvme ssd, tried many ways to fix but no succesck. I have to go back to SATA ssd and it work, same bootable usb with windows 10 installation.
After I got into windows with SATA ssd, I have cloned SATA ssd to nvme ssd, but the problem still there.
Don’t know how to fix. If someone has been thru this, please help

 

[Colif]

I have the same problem with nvme ssd, tried many ways to fix but no succesck. I have to go back to SATA ssd and it work, same bootable usb with windows 10 installation.
After I got into windows with SATA ssd, I have cloned SATA ssd to nvme ssd, but the problem still there.
Don’t know how to fix. If someone has been thru this, please help

please make your own post about the problem, this is an old thread and only those of us (like me) who are involved will look at it. I am going to close it, start a conversation with me and give me new link once you start own thread, and I see what I can do