Unable to boot, error 0xc0000428

I believe I am booting normally - I'm just turning it on with no DVD in the drive and booting from the HDD. How do I force a normal boot?

Kaktussoft said:

You default boot entry is win7 but now you boot in windows recovery environment. No option to boot normally on boot?

Code:

bcdedit /set  {default}  recoveryenabled  no

There was no option to boot normally when rebooting. I used the above code to deactivate the recovery environment, which did at least force the normal boot sequence. But now I am running into the same issue I had near the start of the thread - File \Windows\system32\winload.exe, error 0xc0000428, "Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this file." I have attached a screenshot of this.

Hitting Enter to continue takes me to the usual boot menu, but pressing Enter to continue or F8 for more options takes me right back to the error screen. I have also attached a screenshot of this.

Any other thoughts on how to disable driver signature enforcement? (the suggestion on the first screenshot).

Thanks, gregrocker. I have tried nearly everything on that list and am still stuck. I'll probably just end up copying everything on the C:/ drive to an external drive and do a fresh installation of Windows. I really, really appreciate all the help you guys have given me on sevenforums!

Well, I'm still open to suggestions if anyone's got any. As a reminder, the current status is error code 0xc0000428, as in post #23 of this current thread (link below).

Unable to boot, error 0xc0000428

Well, this is a very late response but I saw my defunct laptop sitting there and decided to give it another go.

Long story short - SOLVED!

Before this last try at it, its status was as I said in post #23:
Unable to boot, error 0xc0000428

Gregrocker, I believed I had followed all the instructions in Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times. According to one of my previous posts (here, post #10) I had checked to see if the correct partition was active and it definitely WAS then, as per the screenshots in that post. I had run Startup Repair 3 times with restarts in between, many times.

Anyway, I followed your second link to Mark Partition Active and decided to mark the correct partition again. From the previous screenshots (here, again - post #10) you can see that Partition 2 was active. But I set Partition 2 to be active again anyway, and my next reboot succeeded.

I've attached a screenshot of my working computer's current output from diskpart. To me it appears that the same partition is active now (and it works) as was active back in post #10 (when it didn't work). If you can find any discrepancies, please let me know! I'm not sure at all why my latest actions worked, since I don't think they changed anything. Perhaps there was some action I took between post #10 and now that cleared the original issue but marked the incorrect active partition. I unfortunately did not look at the active partition immediately before re-declaring partition 2 as active again.

But I would like to once again say THANK YOU to all who contributed to this thread. All contributions were helpful and I learned a lot about the various stages of Windows' boot process. I hope that this thread will help someone else in the future.

Please post back a screenshot of Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image - Windows 7 Forums.

I see you have a tiny OEM partition at the beginning of the HD sitting on the boot sector. Does this mean you still have the corrupt factory preinstall with all the bloatware that throttles and ruins Win7? If so I would strongly consider a Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 to enjoy the OS's native performance. Be sure to delete all partitions during booted install. Everything you need is in the blue link.