Michael Gauci | Windows 10 boot issue checklist

To proceed, you must first download the Windows 10 ISO and transfer it onto a USB drive with Ventoy installed (which sidesteps the use of the Windows Media Creation tool). Then, select the USB drive from the boot menu, and choose: Repair your computer > Advanced options > Troubleshoot.

This checklist is arranged from the simplest remedies to the most advanced, so walk through them sequentially until you find one that works.

Use Startup Repair

Startup Repair is a Windows 10 tool which can automatically fix problems that are preventing your PC from starting correctly. To launch it, select ‘Startup Repair’ from the Advanced options menu.

Fix corrupted MBR

If the MBR (Master Boot Record) of your system drive gets corrupted, it can cause the “No boot device available” error. Boot into a Windows installation media, go into the Advanced options and at the command prompt, enter:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /scanos
bootrec /rebuildbcd

bootrec sometimes has problems finding the proper boot device and Windows installation to fix. When this happens, the last command returns the error:

The requested system device cannot be found.

Repair Windows file system

diskpart
sel disk 0
list vol
exit

Run chkdsk for all the identifed drives, like so:

chkdsk D: /f

Repair EFI bootloader

bcdedit can be used to manage BCD stores on a WIndows machine which describe boot applications and boot application settings. A broken EFI bootloader returns the following error message:

The requested system device cannot be found.

Before proceeding with this procedure, make sure that your EFI partition is formatted as FAT32.

With the EFI partition on B:, execute:

cd /d b:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\
bootrec /fixboot

Delete or rename the BCD file:

ren BCD BCD.bak

With the Windows partition on C:, recreate the BCD store:

bcdboot c:\Windows /l en-gb /s b: /f ALL

The /f ALL parameter updates the BIOS settings (including UEFI firmware/NVRAM), and /l is included to specify a different locale other than the default US English.

Format EFI partition to FAT32

The procedure outlined in this comment is particularly known for fixing boot issues arising after cloning to a larger SSD, namely having the EFI partition being converted from FAT32 to NTFS. You may want to repeat the cloning process with different software, just in case.

Enter diskpart.

Identify the EFI partition with dir command. There should be boot files but no EFI folder. If you are unable to read a particular volume, use chkdsk to repair its file structure and try again.

If necessary, assign a drive letter to the identified volume:

sel vol 3
assign letter=D:

Clean out the damaged partition and make it usable for EFI:

format D: /fs:FAT32

Then, with the Windows partition on C:, issue the command:

bcdboot C:\windows /s D:

Make sure you know what you’re doing and format the right EFI partition, not your active C:\\Windows drive or some other data drive! Anything over a couple hundred MB in size won’t be an EFI partition.

Finally, check that the boot option in the BIOS is set to UEFI and not legacy.

Check the hardware

Seagate provides a checklist for troubleshooting an internal SSD that is not detected in the BIOS.

Disk health monitoring utilities exist for both Windows and Linux, with popular ones being CrystalDiskInfo and smartmontools. Note that since SATA interface errors are reported distinctly from drive errors, the tests are primarly independant of the SATA cable. If you suspect a bad cable you should replace it. See here for further discussion on this topic.

Follow this guide for an in-depth hardware check.

Conclusion

By now, you should have resolved your issue using one of the solutions mentioned above. If not, try reading this article which starts off with an in-depth explanation of GPT/UEFI boot but then proceeds to lay out some details on how to create a proper disk layout for UEFI boot from a GPT disk.