Windows 10: BCD - Editing Boot Entries C: now E: windows split between 2

Hi There,

I posted on this forum the other day in 'Drivers and Hardware' and got a good response. (That question was about Diskpart and the OEM recovery drive letter to get the partition table corrected for rewritting with TestDisk). But having done this and not really found any problems with TestDisdk - structure is ok etc. I have now moved onto the third issue with windows. For the purposes of reitterating my problem I have posted it below under (-----); so everything is in one place.

I have three main issues with windows: 1) BCD corrupt - probably BCD store; 2) Partition Table Repair and 3) no OS found which are all related. For the first two I have had the best responses with Bootrec along with TestDisk and BCD\Boot too repair so I can do these and nothing changes. Bootrec does make a new MBR and fixes the boot and as I have said TestDisk does not really display anthing wrong with the partition table - but this may be my reading of the info which is to do with partition type etc (P; E; L and D; double entries and green highlighting etc).

So now I want to address the third issue - no OS found. This is too do with c: (also minimal system32 here) developing a second drive E: which has most of windows on it, but a minimal system32 which I have had to configure the config folder for along with my files siting here; the recovery process generated the E: drive (ramdisk) or most likely the power surge when coming out of hibernation that corrupted the BCD store.

Here is the BCD Boot entries I need help with - hope this is the correct section of this forum? I notice from:

bcdedit /store c:\boot\bcd /enum

... that for Windows Boot Manager: the resumeobject and for Windows Boot Loader: the recoverysequence along with the resumeobject all have the same GUID; that of the GUID for E: So E: is the source of windows boot loader, the recovery process and for hiberanation; whilst on other pc's there are three different GUID's for each respective entry.

How do I set the resume and the recovery GUID's?

Also this code changes values, is this just for the name / entry of the device and osdevice?

bcdedit /store c:\boot\bcd /set {default} device partition=c:

bcdedit /store C:\boot\bcd /set {default} osdevice partition=c:

Any ideas on this?


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A power surge has caused my OS to crash. And, this was only due to coming out of hibernation. Then it went into recovery mode. From the command prompt I have tried the usual troubleshooting. That is after letting automatic repair have a go. I was in a loop with this failing and starting again. I ran bootrec which fixed the MBR but was denied access when I ran /fixboot until I did this via the DVD that I booted it off that then was fixed. So next I tried SFC that included as offline. Which resulted in 'windows resource protection was unable to perform this operation', and in all cases. Chkdsk did close a process amd_64... which I think came from WinSxS and then it was able to run a check when dismounted finding nothing wrong with the HD. (I had only done this days earlier, and it passed with no probems then). Then I turned to DISM and could not run this as /Online as this was not supported by WinPE. But nor was it with /offline, and I tried a variety of these. (Please note there are no logs, except when taken from X: and they are not that informative. Stuff like E: is not a wim mount point was the best). A missing ssshim.dll (copied off X: to c: and E was mentioned as part of the errors 2, 3, 50 and 1639. These all failed. As did a reset: 'there was a problem resetting your pc no changes were made.'

The problem is the power surge has damaged the partition table etc and the recovery process has produced a ramdisk E: which has most of the files on; windows and my own. The c: drive has system32 but it is minimal barely worth mentioning. I have configured a system32 folder with config for the E: drive from X:. This does nothing for ssshim.dll etc nor for bootrec to fix startup repair /automatic repair problem. Rebuilding the BCD gave me error 0xc000000f but I repaired this. Turning off automatic repair gave me error 0xc000000f too. From these I got a srttrail.txt log which confirmed what I thought. Partition Table Repair and No OS present. TestDisk gave me error 0xc0000225 which bootrec etc solved. Rebooting was problematic at first then it stabilised to how it was when it crashed. So that is the problem so far.

:)

 

How to clean up BCD entries? Rebuild the BCD?

This is normal that under Recovery Environment, The letters are re-assigned. This is why you have to be careful and select the correct one.
@dictum
Advice: Never use Easy BCD with Windows installed using GPT disk. Use Easy UEFI instead provided you know what you are doing. Easy BCD only works with MBR disk type.
Base on the screen shot above. Your disk 0 is your new Windows and your disk 1 contains the old Windows. Disk 3 contains a 512MB Fat32 partition and I don't know what that is. I suggest you disconnect disk 3 for now before proceeding.

Let rebuild new BCD's for both disk 0, and disk 1. Please follow step by step on the 2 screen shots below. On step 3, write down the drive letter for PM981_New. In the screen shot, My Windows is still assigned to C but it might be different from yours. In step 10, if the drive letter is different than C, then use the letter in step 3.

Do exactly the same for disk 1, this time select disk 1 in step 4 and assign letter V in step 7, Use V and the drive letter for Old Windows in step 10. This will create a new BCD for PM981_Old and you will be able to boot separately from boot menu.

From boot menu, select which one to boot from.
Once booted into Windows. If you wish, you can set up dual boot for Windows old & New. Under This PC, look for the drive letter of the offline Windows and type:
bcdboot X:\Windows where X is the letter of the offline Windows

 

How to clean up BCD entries? Rebuild the BCD?

I was able to get into it, except it's called F: and not C: in my case.















Hitting F11 upon boot cycle to get into bootable devices menu results in some bogus devices:




Attachment 251576

and selecting one of the bogus devices results in a unbootable menu choice:







This disk does not exist and I have to hit Control-Alt-delete several times to get back to the boot menu.
Basically nothing is resolved, I still have bogus entry in the BCD store. Or whatever it's called. NVRAM I think it is.

- - - Updated - - -


as for the second part:








didn't work.

This is what the correct boot entry looks like. The PM981_old entry doesn't boot anything, even though I added it with EasyBCD. That's fine, at least the primary boots (called PM981_new, the highlighted option).






This is an example of a bogus, non-existent entry that I can't delete. The disks it points to don't exist.

Bunch of junk, bogus, non-existent entries, the good one is not even the first one in the list:









For example if I select #1 in the above list, I get this:





and it doesn't go anywhere, can't find the disk since it doesn't exist and I don't know how to purge it out of ther.e


I re-burned the Windows recovery thing onto the flash and able to boot off it again:

 

Getting rid of non-working boot devices in the BIOS

Finally, it took two steps to eliminate the duplicate boot entries in my case. But, it's important to note that I have separate disk drives for data, and two separate SSDs, one for each OS.
1. Disconnected the two data drives, and installed a fresh copy of Linux Mint 19.1. (The fresh copy of Windows 10 was installed a week ago.) This erased all but two of the old boot entries. Both Linux grub, and the BIOS list of boot entries showed the same two dead entries.
2. Booted into Windows and used Visual BCD from Visual BCD Editor - graphical bcdedit for Windows 7-10 which allows to edit the boot list, and I deleted them manually. Then, reconnected the data drives and now the boot list shows only the working boot entries