Our computer can perfectly be the most important work or leisure item, so any failure it can give us can be very frustrating. A failure that may appear when trying to start the computer is that the dreaded blue screen appears with the error 0xc0000221 in Windows 10 . This causes the system to stall in an attempt at continuous automatic repair.
Normally when this happens, a message appears on a blue screen indicating:
“Your PC needs to be repaired.
The operating system could not be loaded because the kernel is missing or contains errors.
File: WINDOWS system32 ntoskrnl.exe Error code: 0xc0000221. ”
Possible causes of error 0xc0000221 in Windows 10
The appearance of this error when starting our computer may be due to different factors such as:
- Failure caused by a third party problem.
- A failed Windows update or a virus has damaged or removed the Ntoskrnl.exe file.
- The Boot.ini setting is invalid.
- The boot volume is corrupted. It may be due to a power failure, that the hard drive is corrupt or has some type of physical damage.
- Corruption of system files. This prevents Windows from accessing the file system of your primary partition.
- Hardware problems created by a new inserted RAM module
Possible solutions
Let’s go over the possible solutions we can try to try to fix the error 0xc0000221 in Windows 10.
- Boot into Safe Mode.
- Perform an SFC, CHKDSK, and DISM scan, in that order.
- Check RAM for problems.
- Perform a repair installation of the Windows 10 operating system.
Boot into Safe Mode and uninstall recent apps
Try booting your computer in Safe Mode to ensure that the problem was not caused by any third-party software. When booting in this mode, our computer will start in a limited way with the basics to be able to proceed with the boot. Once Safe Mode has started, the problem may be due to a program that we recently installed, so we must uninstall the latest software that we have installed and then restart the computer.
Scanning corrupted files with SFC
Now we are going to scan possible correct files, for this we will use a tool that Windows has called SFC (System File Checker).
To do this we must start in Safe Mode and access the “Command Prompt”. To do this, from the Cortana search engine we write Command Prompt, right-click and select “Run as Administrator”. Once the black panel appears we write sfc / scannow. Once the process is finished, we restart the computer.
Run CHKDSK Utility
If we still see the error when starting up, it is probably due to a hard disk failure. To check it we will use CHKDSK Utility . This tool is used to check the integrity of hard drives and repair errors in the file system.
To run it, we retype Command Prompt in Cortana’s browser and log in as Administrator. Now we will write chkdsk / f / C: (If our boot drive is not in C: you must replace it with the corresponding drive D :, E :, etc). Once finished we will restart the computer and check that it can boot correctly.
Run DSIM
In case the error persists , we will use the DSIM tool, which is used to repair the Windows image or modify Windows installation media, taking care of detecting the defective file and changing it for a new one.
In this case we will start the Command Prompt again as administrator and write dism / online / cleanup-image / restorehealth and press Enter.
Before executing it, we must take into account that we have an Internet connection. The process can be somewhat long, so we should not interrupt it. Once it has finished we will proceed to restart the computer to check if the error continues to appear.
Check RAM
If all of the above did not work, it may be a problem related to RAM. To check it we will use the ” Windows Memory Diagnostic ” tool, which will be in charge of testing all the RAM and finding faults and defective sectors.
To do this, in Cortana’s search box, write Windows Memory Diagnostic. A dialog window will appear and we will choose the option “Restart now and check if there are problems (Recommended)”. Once the memory test passes 100%, the system will automatically reboot.
Perform a repair installation of the Windows 10 operating system
If the error error 0xc0000221 continues to appear when starting the computer, the best option is to re-install Windows 10, managing to repair any installation problem and any component of the operating system that may be damaged.
