PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED (Windows 11 Upgrade 10.0.22000.120) after reboot.

[Baltazarus]

Ok, so I was enjoying the Windows 11 until I installed 10.0.22000.120 Upgrade. After that one upgrade, this turned into a horrible nightmare. My pc booted up and after loading circle screen passed, I received black screen. I entered the task manager and ended explorer.exe and then ran it again. Later, I launched devmgmt.msc and uninstalled my graphics driver. Screen appeared again, yay! And suddenly, popup menus weren't showing, neither taskbar icons, nor search bar and start menu, aw! I installed my graphics driver again and it fixed the problem, buuut, unfortunately, first problem started to repeat. Then, I entered the troubleshoot reboot menu and recovered my system to date before this upgrade took place and after recovery ended, SUDDENLY, that blue loading screen appeared on screen and then, I knew, Windows 10! How? I didn't event requested back to Windows 10. After downloading Windows 11 from insider again, I rebooted the PC and then, boom! BSOD: PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED, automatically received reboot and then, Windows 10 booted again! Pew! Repeated the process million times (actually 5 times, 5 BSODs and 5000 lost nerves), took me total 10 hours and it was the same! Someone could think that I was enjoying doing that (I suffered!). Let's put jokes aside, this is a serious problem, 10.0.22000.120 is really unstable and I think it requires fix. I really want to get back to Windows 11 (I fell in love with Win11) just a joke, but I prefer it over Windows 10 (better design, performance and gaming experience so far).
 

My PC specifications are compatible with Windows 11 requirements
TPM 2.0
UEFI BIOS, Secure Boot
Over 64GB of SSD space
Please, put some helpful tips that can take me back to Windows 11. Thank you  

[#2]

Same here, I was able to install versions .65 and .100, albeit I was unable to use W11 due to taskbar bugs, but .120 upgrade just fails at installation with immediate rollback to W10.

[#3]

I'm on .120 and haven't had any problems except Windows Sandbox not working, and that's a known and reported issue going back too .100. Otherwise .120 has been fine for me. Some people are having issues with it though, others aren't. I'm in DEV and haven't had any issues with any of the builds, and I'm on an old computer on one of my computers. There can be many reasons for your issues. Your computer doesn't meet the minimum requirements so it's not able to properly run Windows 11 or as the builds add more features and abilities your computer might be having problems handing it. Your PC barley meets the minimum requirements and is still struggling with Windows 11. There's hardware or software issues interfering that is causing the issues you mentioned. There could be a glitch in this build version where some PC's aren't able to handle it.  You can revert back to Windows 10 and wait into a more stable version of Windows 11 in Beta Channel is released or wait into the stable released version of Windows 11 is released. You can system restore back to .100 if you were on it, and if it allows you (not grayed out), put yourself into the Release Preview Channel which will stop Beta builds for awhile and try Beta Channel again when a new release comes out. 

[#4]

By any chance, has anyone here tried using BCDBoot to repair their boot entries? I suspect that they are what's causing these shenanigans, especially regarding the Windows Rollback entry, which from what I've seen points to the wrong path for it's WinRE image.

[#5]

PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED is a bug on 22000.120, I can reproduce it on both Development and Beta channels.
It doesn't matter if it is a machine meeting the hardware requirements or not.
MS just screwed up the recovery on the latest build.

[#6]

Could you explain where you see the wrong path to WinRE image ?
I can easily reproduce the bug, if you have a way to fix it, please share and I can try.
For now I worked around the problem by updating to 22000.100 first and then in a second step let W.U. go to 22000.120. With the 2 step update I don't see the bug at all.

[#7]

If you do "bcdedit /enum all" in an admin command prompt on a system that has the BSOD issue, specifically when rolling back to Windows 10 in my case, then look for the Windows Rollback BCD entry, you'll notice that it looks for the WinRE.wim image inside C:\$WINDOWS.~BT, however, that folder will end up actually being found in windows.old. Regarding the upgrade issue, the BCD entry and folders used for that likely will be different, in that case just find one labelled along the lines of 'Windows 11' or 'Windows Setup', check what folder the 'device' and 'osdevice' entries try to access, and check where it's located to see if the actual location matches with the location that the BCD entry is checking for.

[#8]

Regarding the rollback issue in particular, that occurs on systems successfully upgraded to 22000.120 directly which attempt to go back to win10(leading to the process1 BSOD). In that case, you could try copying the BT folder over to the root C drive, ensuring that 2 copies are present in both C and C:\Windows.old, and then attempt the rollback and see if that works, or you could try using bcdboot to rebuild the BCD manually. For the upgrade issue, I'm not too sure on that since I haven't encountered it myself.

[#9]

@schm1dt I copied the BT folder to C:\ and tried rolling back through settings and it gives me this 'Error Code 0x0000001'. Could u explain the BCDboot thing?Is it safe? (Im weak at this stuff)

[#10]

Where did this error show up by any chance? Did it show after the reboot to start the rollback or did it show beforehand? If it showed beforehand, did you make sure to keep a copy of the folder in windows.old? Finally, if it showed up after the reboot, if it was on a recovery screen that let you try again using enter, do that and see if it blue-screens. If it does BSOD still then it looks like the recovery image itself is corrupt, meaning that we'll just have to wait for Microsoft to fix their shit.

[#11]

Yes your right I got that after the reboot and it was on a recovery screen (forgot to mention this my bad). And yes I kept the BT folder as it was in the folder and just copied and pasted in the C:\ folder.

[#12]

Does it let you press enter to try again? And does that kick you back to the recovery screen or continue to boot? If it lets you continue to boot, also tell me if it BSODs or not.

[#13]

Yes so i get this screen...also when i hit enter it BSOD's and i get the 'PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED' and then it just restarts and loads Windows 11.@schm1dt 

[#14]

You don't need to worry about the recovery screen itself then, as that's just showing cause of the BSOD. However, it looks like we are **bleep**ed until Microsoft patches W11 to fix the recovery image,, as it looks like that's simply failing to load now.

[#15]

Yosh will have to wait....

[#16]

I already did that and it did not help
the only workaround is to replaced the winre.wim with the one from previous build
and copy to "C:\windows\system32\recovery\
and use the command line in elevated prompt command
reagentc /disable
reagentc /setreimage /path C:\windows\system32\recovery\
reagentc /enable

[#17]

Did this work "the only workaround is to replaced the winre.wim with the one from previous build
and copy to "C:\windows\system32\recovery\
and use the command line in elevated prompt command
reagentc /disable
reagentc /setreimage /path C:\windows\system32\recovery\
reagentc /enable"
work for you?

[#18]

Yeah that can work for now, it's caused by MS integrating a broken KB update into WinRE on direct upgrades to .120, although I'd personally suggest putting the old WinRE.wim image into your actual recovery partition for the sake of making it a little cleaner (should be able to do this via windows install media)

[#19]

I have the same problem: Windows 11 enterprise does not boot in winre (missing drivers in winre.wim)

[#20]

dang sorry I want windows 11 but I cant upgrade to Dev of Beta channel I think we can all agree that we are all living horrible nightmare