Vista error while booting: 0xc00000e9 unexpected error has occurred

While trying to start up my Dell laptop with Vista Home Basic installed on it, I got an error saying that the winload.exe is missing. I ran the bcdedit commands to set the osdevice and device partitions. While trying to boot again, got an error again this time saying that Kernel is missing or corrupt. I tried to run a repair using the Vista installation cd but the repair failed midway. I tried to do a clean reinstall on the machine which completed successfully. But when I tried to boot the machine again, it gave an error 0xc00000e9 unexpected error has occurred with no other options. Running repair and reinstallation again did not work. I see that a lot of people have faced this problem but I could not find any solution which would work for me. Any clue about how to solve this and what is the cause of this problem? It has been really frustrating till now

Hello IamThe,
If the E9 code is correct, then this is the bugcheck for your error.

STOP 0x000000E9: ACTIVE_EX_WORKER_THREAD_TERMINATION

Usual causes: Device driver

As you can see, the most probable cause is a driver.

Have you tried to boot into safe mode ?.
If you can get to safe mode with networking, go to C > Windows > Minidump and upload the files. You may need to save them to desktop before you zip them up and upload them.

Take a look and post your results, good luck.

I am unable to boot the machine in the safe mode either. If I select the safe mode, it just restarts back again and throws the same error.

When you did the re-install, did you format the drive first ?.

The best thing you can do, right now is to boot off a linux live cd (i prefer ubuntu) and then look for the minidump files in our c drive from the live cd.

Yes, I did format the drive on which the OS is installed and tried reinstalling. This time, the computer tried to restart while in the process of reinstalling Vista but hung up while trying to boot the OS for almost 30-45 mins. I didn't wait for any longer since it seemed unlikely that it should take that long to start again.

If you have a Vista disk try this, but it may be the hard drive failing.
The problem is, it could be a hardware problem, memory, Motherboard, or HDD.

How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows