Tigraine

Daniel Hoelbling-Inzko talks about programming

Windows 10 Error Message 0xc000000e after installing dual boot system

I recently decided to install Ubuntu as a second boot option on my main PC at home. Since I do a lot of unix development lately and really hate working on my small Macbook it seemed like the logical alternative to install Ubuntu on the big machine.

So my old setup was a 240gb SSD that previously held my Windows 10 install and I got a new 500gb Samsung SSD that should replace the old drive as my main OS disk. So using my old but proven dd copy method to move the old 240gb SSD to the more spacious 500gb SSD I freed up the old 240gb SSD for the fresh Ubuntu install.

Everything worked fine with copying, Windows worked flawlessly on the new 500gb SSD - until I also installed the 240gb SSD and set up Ubuntu on it. Ubuntu would load fine, but when I tried to boot into Windows it would fail with the 0xc000000e error showing me the Windows 10 boot repair options.

The weird thing here was that I was able to boot into Windows perfectly fine once I unplugged the 240gb Ubuntu SSD, but as long as that SSD was in the system I could not get Windows Bootloader to start up Windows. Even when I changed the boot settings in my Bios to bypass grub and go straight to the Windows Bootloader.

With the kind help of the people in the askubuntu forums I finally found the solution: Windows BCD apparently does not like it when you change the order of it's harddrives. So half the bootloader was loading from UEFI, but it could not hand off to the real bootloader on my 500gb SSD - it was expecting that disk to be first in my system, but instead it became my second disk since the 240gb SSD was now on SATA1 and the 500gb disk was on SATA2.

After switching the cables around everything worked fine and I could boot into Windows using the Windows Bootloader in my UEFI Bios, or I could start up Grub and chainload into the Windows Bootloader from there without issue.

Filed under ubuntu, windows, windows10, boot

Disk shows up in BIOS but not in Windows 10 (AHCI Hotplug)

So today I installed a new Drive-Bay that makes a 5.2" Slot on my computer into a dock for 3.5" SATA drives. The installation worked fine, I enabled Hot-Plug in my UEFI-BIOS and everything looked ok. Until I installed my hard drive into the bay and Windows would not recognize it at all.

I went back into the BIOS, this time with 3.5" drive installed in the bay and saw that the drive is showing up in my BIOS monitor just fine. Just to make sure I re-checked the power connections and finally I plugged the drive directly into the SATA port to make sure it's not the Drive-Bay that's at fault. Still Windows 10 would not recognize the drive.

After looking around on the Internet I found this very interesting forum thread on TomsHardware that suggested running the Windows 10 Memory Diagnostic. Well - no clue why it worked - but it did.

After running the diagnostic on minimal settings with only one pass Windows bootet again and the drive was there and it even shows up in the "Remove Hardware securely" section which I need for Hot-Swapping the drive.

Filed under hardware, windows, bios, ahci

Random PC freezes and reboots under load

I just switched some components on my computer to get some more speed out of my photography retouching workflow. Since I really hate waiting for Lightroom I opted for a really beefy i7-5820K with a pretty oversized motherboard and plenty of ram. I kept my trusty Geforce GTX 760 TI all of my peripherals - but the 6 (12 logical) cores really ought to speed up my workflow.

So I ordered my stuff and assembled it - even upgraded my case from a Midi-Tower to a Full-Tower to get better air-flow and cooling to my hard drives. I spent way too much time tidying up cables and making the whole build really solid. Everything worked flawlessly at first. Until the next day where I was scheduled for a meeting with a client at 4pm and wanted to transfer some images to the iPad to show during the meeting.

So I spun up Lightroom, selected some of my favourite images from last weeks wedding and hit Export like I did a thousand times before. But this time the computer just rebootet after a few seconds.

Ok so I was royally screwed, I retried immediately and the computer froze once more. Looking into the Eventlog I found a critical Kernel-Power 41 error without any useful description whatsoever.

At that point I had to quit and get to the meeting - without the images, but when I came back and searched a bit online Idiscovered that Kernel-Power 41 can mean a multitude of things, but mostly that the system did not cleanly shut down and that most likely a Power-Supply-Unit issue is causing it.

So I did the math on my components and found that the rig should run at peak power consumption somewhere around 520 Watts - with a bit undersized 550W PSU installed (your PSU should have around 30% headroom over the peak consumption to be able to absorb spikes without any issues). So I frantically searched for a new PSU and got myself a 750W beQuiet! unit. After another hour of routing all the cables and making sure everything is neat and tidy inside my case I turned on the computer - ran a Lightroom export and the system crashed once again :(.

This time I was sure the PSU is fine (and probably has been fine all along) and I looked at the Graphics-Card and the RAM for the culprit. I re-installed everything once more to make sure all the leads are connected correctly and the system still froze.

Next up I decided to reset my UEFI-BIOS to factory defaults and try again - to no avail. Until I decided to disable the Intel XMP RAM overclocking that was being applied and voila - the system is stable under extreme loads! So apparently G.Skill has screwed up somewhere with their G.Skill Ripjaws 4 3000mhz kits and the XMP profile configured by my BIOS was causing system

Turns out: Enabling the XMP Profile for my RAM did not disable the Turbo-Boost. It only overcloed the System to 3.6ghz, but whenever Windows decided the System could use some more Horsepower it instructed the CPU to go into Turbo-Boost which overclocked the overclocked system by another 30%. Needless to say that was outside the safe range for the RAM and the system crashed. I noticed this for the first time after disabling the XMP profile and monitoring my RAM under load - it was already running at 3ghz without the overclock settings in the BIOS.

And: Having your system randomly freeze and reboot at various steps of your Windows updates also sucks - I am now stuck with a failing Windows .NET Framework 4.2 updatee and can't upgrade to Windows 10 :(

Filed under windows, pc

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