Unable to set up Windows via UEFI installation.
Unable to set up Windows via UEFI installation.
Recently I chose to set up a brand new Windows installation, so I made a bootable USB using the Windows Media Creation Tool, cleared my SSD, and installed Windows properly. But I saw it was starting in legacy mode instead of UEFI. I adjusted the SSD layout to GPT and turned off CSM in BIOS. After that, Windows kept refusing to boot, always showing the recovery error code "0xc00000e9" linked to the winload.efi file. I couldn't get it to start again because the tool relied on MBR partitioning. I reformatted the drive and built a fresh Windows install with Rufus, choosing GPT and UEFI boot settings. Once tested on my laptop, everything worked fine. But when I switched back to my PC, every time I tried to boot from the USB it brought up recovery mode again. I checked by unplugging the SSD to rule out interference, but the problem persisted. I also tried using different Windows ISO files on the drive, yet nothing resolved the issue. I suspect there might be an EFI-related problem with my motherboard, though I’m not certain. My system model is ASRock B450M-HDV R4.0 with BIOS version P10.10.
I would rebuild the media creation tool and then configure the UEFI correctly before starting. CSM was turned off, and then I applied advanced options during Windows installation to remove and manually format the drive. Over the past few years, I've often had to tackle complex tasks like fixing the boot manager, partitions, files, etc. There might be other clues about the issue, but at least I would apply the best settings—non-CSM UEFI with GPT.
I attempted to create the bootable drive several times and consistently got the same outcome. It seems to enter recovery mode regardless of the device, working fine on my laptop but not on my PC. I installed Linux via UEFI, yet Windows fails to function properly on my computer.
UEFI seems to be the main concern. If resetting CMOS or updating the UEFI doesn’t resolve the issue, it likely points to a non-default setting within the UEFI. This problem often appears with newer systems and reinstalling Windows, especially when using custom builds, affecting CSM support and 32-bit configurations.