Windows 8 recovery USB not booting

I created a Windows 8 recovery USB drive in preparation for replacing the hard drive in my Samsung NP540.

When I boot from the drive, I get a screen reading:

Recovery

Your PC needs to be repaired

The application or operating system couldn't be loaded because a required file is missing or
contains errors.

File: \windows\system32\boot\winload.efi
Error code: 0xc0000001

You'll need to use the recovery tools on your installation media. If you don't have any installation
media (like a disc or USB device), contact your system administrator or PC manufacturer.

Press Enter to try again
Press F8 for Startup Settings
Press Esc for UEFI Firmware Settings

The machine shipped with Windows 8 and has since been upgraded to Windows 8.1.

Potential things I can think of:

• I used the built-in Windows recovery disk creator, rather than the Samsung-specific recovery tool (which I've never looked at).

• There was one forum post I stumbled across where someone suggested that you needed to check the segment size used when formatting the drive or something to that effect. That sounds somewhat unusual to me, but then this is UEFI we're talking about.

• The machine is running 8.1 but shipped with 8 and thus had 8 on its recovery partition. This shouldn't be a problem, right?

The major requirements for UEFI boot from USB are:

1. USB Format is FAT or FAT32.

2. Boot files are installed to folder \EFI.

Examine with explorer/file manager your USB drive, also the presence and version of winload.efi in \Windows\System32.

Boot chain is signed which means that boot manager must be newer or same version as winload.exe/efi (compare date of digital signatures for winload.efi and bootmgr.efi).

You can download Windows 8.1 from Microsoft and create DVD/USB which can be used for installation and recovery of Windows 8.1.

The easiest way for moving Windows from one disk to another is by using disk imaging (for example free solution Macrium Reflect). On GPT disk Windows 8/10 uses minimum 3 partitions - EFI System partition, MS Reserved and Windows partition so they must be included in image!