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winload.exe missing or corrupt

My end-user has a Dell Latitude E5510 running Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit. She had a 250 GB HDD that was nearly full so I replaced it with a 750 GB drive and used Clonezilla (twice) and Symantec Ghost (once) to image the old drive to the new one. In each case, a full disk-to-disk image was done with the imaging software resizing the partitions (Dell Utility, System Recovery and OS).

In each case, booting the system from the newly cloned drive results in Windows Startup Repair running and eventually saying it cannot fix the problem. Subsequently, I've tried everything I can find in the Microsoft knowledgebase/community and the various blogs and forums. These include (not necessarily in this order - we tried this in various orders after each of the three reimagings):

Running Startup Repair three times in a row with a restart between each run

bootrec /fixmbr, /fixboot, /rebuildbcd

Backup and remove existing bcd, then recreate it

Replace \windows\system32\winload.exe with \windows\system32\boot\winload.exe

sfc /scannow

System Restore (no restore points available)

In the end, the best we could get is to have Windows black screen on boot with a message about winload.exe being missing or corrupt.

BUT... If you press F8 during boot, Safe Mode works as does "Disable driver signature enforcement." In fact, the latter seemingly allows the computer to boot and act completely normally. (The end-user has the computer back and is testing.) But, having to press F8 and then disable driver signature enforcement for every single boot is, at the minimum, annoying to the end-user and, at worse, disabling one of Windows built-in security features.

Any thoughts, other than a clean install?

SOLUTION

Robert Retzer

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SOLUTION

jimmy1223

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A-p-u

ASKER

@web_tracker - That was our thought too but the question becomes what driver(s) to reinstall? The only "new" device is the hard disk drive itself and Windows provides that driver. All other hardware is the same from the original install.

@jimmy1223 - Tried those steps, no luck.

nobus

try imaging the whole disk with paragon's B&R :
http://www.paragon-software.com/free/

i found it works fine, and it's free- so nothing lost in trying !

SOLUTION

David Johnson, CD

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

joinaunion

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LeeTutor

I've requested that this question be deleted for the following reason:

Not enough information to confirm an answer.

A-p-u

ASKER

All of the suggested solutions seem to be correct based on the research we did prior to my posting but none of them work in this case. Ultimately, the end-user has decided to live with it for now. The only other option seems to be a clean install of Windows and she does not want to have to find the install media for all of the applications she uses.

Robert Retzer

thanks for your fairness in awarding the points the way you did.