Windows 10: Multiple Boot Managers and/or active partitions error

Hello,

I get an error, about once every 4/5 months when the PC is interrupted via a power surge or incorrectly turned off during a restart that results in me having to fix, reset and rebuild the boot manager. It's a quick and usually painless process. I'm on Windows 10, 64bit, Home Edition and haven't installed any OS updates in a few weeks.

However today I made an error when bootrec /fixboot was giving me an access denied response, and made things considerably worse, and continued to double down on these errors until I realised the extent of my mistake.

C Drive, is where the OS is (well used to be at this rate) installed. It only had two partitions to the extent of my memory and one of them was for Windows. D Drive is just the main hard drive, nothing windows related on there.

On my BIOS, it used to list both of my hard drives on there. Now it only lists my C: Drive and the D: Drive is just called Hard Disk Windows Boot Manager.

I believe the command that sent everything down hill was bcdboot D:\Windows, which I now realise was where it all began and made things worse as I attempted to correct it.

Following info is all from the CMD prompt in windows recovery.

C Drive now has Windows.old on it, instead of Windows.
D Drive now has Windows, Windows.old and Windows10Upgrade on it.

Needless to say that should probably be the other way around, also not sure where the upgrade folder came from.

DiskPart gives the following:

Disk 0 | Online | 2794 GB | Free 0B | Dyn (Blank) | Gpt ( * ) - D Drive
Disk 1 | Online | 465 GB | Free 1024KB | Dyn (Blank) | Gpt ( * ) - C Drive

Volume 0 | E | | DVD-ROM | 0 B | No Media
Volume 1 | C | NTFS | Partition | 2794 GB | Healthy
Volume 2 | D | NTFS | Partition | 464 GB | Healthy
Volume 3 | | NTFS | Partition | 450 MB | Healthy | Hidden
Volume 4 | | FAT32 | Partition | 100 MB | Healthy | Hidden
Volume 5 | | NTFS | Partition | 872 MB | Healthy | Hidden

Disk 0 (D: Drive) Partition List

Partition 1 | Reserved | 128 MB | 17 KB
Partition 2 | Primary | 2794 GB | 129 MB

Disk 1 (C: Drive) Partition List

Partition 1 | Recovery | 450 MB | 1024 KB
Partition 2 | System | 100 MB | 451 MB
Partition 3 | Reserved | 16 MB | 551 MB
Partition 4 | Primary | 464 GB | 567 MB
Partition 5 | Recovery | 872 MB | 464 GB

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I can't think of anything else relevant that I've seen in the past two hours, but this all happened because bootrec /fixboot said Access Denied, so I tried alternative solutions on the internet and a typo ruined me. I've tried two system restores to yesterday and last week to no avail, the in-built automatic repair is stuck in a loop of no fixing and starting again, I am currently creating a recovery disk on my laptop to put on a USB drive but I'm not hopeful of that fixing everything.

I tried setting C: as active, but it said it couldn't set that drive as active because it wasn't MBR and D: gave the same error.

I tried to copy the boot mgr over to C: but it said there was an error preventing me from copying it.

I'm very hesitant to try anything else on the risk it'll make it worse or force me to do a full wipe. My external HD died suddenly last weekend, so I was going to replace it this month, there's timing for you.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, apologies if I haven't explained anything clearly. Basically windows is now on the wrong hard drive, can't copy it to the proper one, don't have access to fix the boot, automatic repair does nothing and there's a lot of volumes and partitions that I'm paranoid to delete or format.

Muchos Gracias.

:)

 

Windows 10 bootmgr error.

Which came first - the boot manager error or you activating the wrong partition?

If the boot manager error came first:

- What was the exact error message?

- What happened just before?

If activating the wrong partition came first:

- What was the purpose in changing the active partition?

- Did you try to reverse this action?

 

Feature update to Windows 10, version 1607 - Error 0x800703ed

In my case, I have a boot manager partition that is the Active / Startable partition. The BIOS boots the boot manager. From the boot manager, I pick Windows. That setup prevents some Microsoft updates from working. The workaround is to make the Windows
partition (most likely, C, be the Active / Startable partition. Then the updates are applied with no problems. Once the updates are applied, I made the boot manager the Active / Startable partition and everything is OK.

 

Hello, I guess despite the known risks you are experiencing you are not yet using disk imaging routinely as we constantly recommend. If you did, you could restore a Windows image, fairly quickly and without technical help. E.g. Macrium Reflect (free) + large enough external storage.

Assuming you don't have a disk image set, and your C: (Windows) partition is still intact,here's what I'd suggest.

1. Create a disk image of what you have now, just so you've got everything secured- just in case.
2. Remove all partitions forming part of Windows, including your Windows partition (C*Smile.
3. Clean install the same build of Windows.
4. From your disk image, replace the newly created C: partition with your old one.
5. Reboot and hope automatic repair sorts things out and you're back in business.

 

The 3 commands below will rebuild the EFI System partition from scratch. From Admin command prompt, just copy and paste or type:

mountvol U: /s
del /f /s /q U:\*.*
bcdboot C:\Windows

Reboot your PC

 

When I enter mountvol U: /s, it says "The parameter is invalid" and stops. Also regarding the bcdboot C:\Windows, as per my original post, whenever I attempt to do that, it says "Failure when attempting to copy boot files." I'm at a loss as to why.

As a general update, I just loaded the recovery tool in, no luck whatsoever. I think the only thing it fixed was the labels being switched in diskpart? bootrec /rebuildbcd says it's found 1 windows install at C:\Windows which filled me with utter joy, I press Y to add to the boot list and it said "The requested system device cannot be found."

 

Did you have a space between U: and /s ?

 

I don't know why you got the error. Take a look at this post: I can't get rid of dual boot option after installing RemixOs - Page 3 - Windows 10 Forums

I gave the same exact commands and it worked.

 

Is it because of the volume letter? I wasn't sure if you wanted me to specifically try to mount volume U: even though that doesn't exist and unmount to reset it. I noticed in your example that you mounted S:. Which actual drive or volume should I mount then delete and is this just to delete the boot volume or will it wipe the drive of files and such?

 

Any unused drive letter can be used. I used U: in this case

• mountvol U: /s ===> will mount the EFI System partition (Volume 4/Partition 2) and assign to letter U:
• del /s/f/q U:\*.* ===> Delete all files in this partition including files in sub folders.
• bcdboot C:\Windows ===> Re-create all needed files to boot Windows.

 

Failure when attempting to copy boot files once again, I tried a variety of letters not in use but no luck.

 

I don't know what you did to fix previously but with the commands above should rebuild the the partition unless the partition itself is corrupted preventing you to run those commands.
Let's try another way:

• Download the Macrium Rescue disk: MacRescue.iso - Google Drive
• Using a USB stick to create a bootable USB with: Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way
• Boot up the PC with UEFI Mode and follow the screen shots to rebuild the EFI System partition.
  NOTE: The title must show: ..... Win PE 10 [UEFI] for step 3 to work since your Windows installed with GPT disk.

IMPORTANT: make sure you use the correct disk in step 2, in your case is disk 1