Windows 11 boot failure after installing Visual Studio 2022

IlarioPla
Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:08:26 +0000
Blueprint

I had a serious issue on my PC while installing Visual Studio 2022, which I need to package Unreal Engine projects.

I tried the installation twice, and both times the same problem happened right after/during the Visual Studio installation.
The download was done using my phone hotspot.

During installation, the system started freezing and becoming unresponsive. The Visual Studio installer stalled during the download/verification phase, and after that Windows began failing to boot properly.

Symptoms

Before the final crash I noticed several strange behaviors:

The system became partially unresponsive.

The SSD was sometimes detected and sometimes not.

At one point the disk appeared as 0 bytes in the Windows installer.

After reconnecting the cables, the SSD appeared again.

Then Windows failed to boot with this error:

Recovery
Your PC/Device needs to be repaired

File: \Windows\System32\config\SYSTEM
Error code: 0xc000014c

This indicates registry corruption (SYSTEM hive).

Troubleshooting attempts

I tried several recovery commands:

chkdsk /f /r

bootrec /fixmbr

bootrec /fixboot

bootrec /rebuildbcd

I also checked:

C:\Windows\System32\Config\RegBack

but it was empty, so there was no registry backup to restore.

I also found an issue related to Intel Platform License Manager Service, which was timing out and seemed to cause system instability.

Final solution

Since the registry could not be restored and recovery failed, I had to do a clean installation of Windows 11 from a USB drive.

Question

Has anyone experienced something similar, where installing Visual Studio leads to registry corruption and boot failure?

I’m trying to understand whether the cause was:

the Visual Studio installation itself,

an Intel service conflict,

the phone hotspot/download corruption,

or possible SSD/SATA instability.

10 posts - 3 participants