Boot loop, missing winload.efi, cannot enter recovery environment
So I have a series of stupid decisions this past 24 hours:
I bought my PC yesterday and attempted to install Windows 11. It was okay at first, but then I realized that even after installing: 1. It was still the USB drive that was being booted, and 2. I cannot see the boot SSD from my UEFI.
So I checked for things like Secure Boot, GPT, those things. All seems to be in order.
Then little by little my PC becomes unusable: I can only access File Explorer, I cannot even press “Restart” or “Shutdown”, then Start won’t show up.
Then I made the worst decision tonight: I thought that MAYBE formatting my drives would allow me to install Windows fresh. So I used MSI’s Secure Erase to clean my drives, and restarted my PC. But then this error showed up:
Your PC needs to be repaired … cannot find file: … winload.efi 0xc000000e
F8 (Recovery Environment) does not work, F1 does not do anything. So I cannot open CMD (?) so the instructions I saw from the internet is not doable.
Is there hope for me? My motherboard is an MSI B650M, and my SSDs are Samsung 990 and Kingston. I would really appreciate the help.
Posted Nov 3, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC