I tried to boot Hiren’s Boot CD 1.0.2 in legacy (BIOS) mode and it gives me this:
0xc0000017
There isn't enough memory available to create a ramdisk device
I checked {badmemory} in the BCD and it’s empty.
It boots normally on another machine.
I then reduced the size of sourcesboot.wim from 1.05 GB to 0.97 GB by mounting it, deleting unnecessary programs in Program Files, unmounting it and then re-exporting it to get rid of the [DELETED] folder. Now it boots normally, with everything else (BIOS settings etc.) unchanged.
So it seems that this machine can’t boot ramdisks larger than 1 GB. What could be causing this? Could it be some limitation of the firmware? It’s a cheap laptop with 4 GB of RAM.
