Tag Archives: File: \ntldr Status: 0xc000000e

Mysterious Vista Bootloader

After spending a weekend trying to upgrade a drive I learned some important things about the Windows Vista Bootloader and the solution to a poorly documented problem:

If you use Acronis True Image 10 or Norton Ghost 9 to “clone” or copy a drive that boots using the Windows Vista Bootloader you will get the following message when trying to boot to any operating systems on that drive:

File: \ntldr
Status: 0xc000000e
Info: Selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing/corrupt.

The reason appears to be that the arcane Vista Bootloader references to the O/S targest on that drive are corrupted (presumably because the Vista Bootloader isn’t backwards compatible with the MBR standards expected by older disk cloning utilities).  The solution is to reset the references using Vista’s BCDEDIT or, better yet, the helpful and free utility EasyBCD.