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HP Laptop won't boot - "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE"
Hey all,
Having a crazy situation with a laptop I offered to clean for somebody. It's an HP laptop and all I was doing was removing some of the HP bloatware that came on it from the factory, and installing some old HP software for an HP printer they no longer have anymore. One of the uninstalls required a restart, so I restarted the machine, but it will no longer boot! :S
Upon attempting to boot, I'll get the Win10 logo and after a moment, the spinning circle pauses for a second and I get a blue screen with a stop code stating "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE." All I had literally done was uninstall some of that HP software that came on the machine (I've cleaned bloatware off other laptops like this dozens of times before!).....what the heck caused this?
Upon restart from this "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE" screen, I will get a 'Recovery' screen immediately after POST saying "Your PC couldn't start properly - A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed. - Error 0xc000000f - You'll need to use recovery tools"..........but the recovery tools in the form of Startup Repair and System Restore won't work....
I created a Win10 Installer/Recovery USB Key and can boot with that. I've tried the 'bootrec.exe /fixmbr' and 'bootrec.exe /fixboot' commands, both to no avail. System Restore doesn't help as they never had it turned on, so there are no Restore Points to use. Startup Repair fails and says it was unable to repair anything.
I'm a bit desparate...what options do I have left? ANY help is appreciated as I am stumped as to what to do next and about what is going on...
Thanks so much!!!