Windows 10: what's involved in the Win 10 boot loader repair ?

I have a Windows XP/ Win 10 dual boot system, and I've also just moved to a replacement motherboard.

The Win 10 handled the different motherboard in it's stride (except for activaton issue, but that's another story)

The Windows XP *seems* like it is OK, but I'm getting some occasional crashes in the avast anti-virus and Firefox,
reinstalling them has not corrected the problem.

Because of this I was considering an XP repair install. If I do this it will more than likely restore it's own boot
loader, so I will not be able boot to Windows 10. I have copy of the bootable build 1607, but I have not found if it
is possible to find a recovery environment from the DVD

I know that pressing F8 in the normal startup can get you there; it accesses c:\recovery and I it runs from there.
Not sure if this is any use to me when the Windows 10 loader has been over written.

I feel like I'm missing something obvious. How is it supposed to work?

:)

 

Vista Green bar UEFI boot mode windows 10

I do see some things I could mention. You do seem to have the older UEFI version. The system shows Secure Boot is unsupported and the computer model is a 68, which might mean it is like my Asus Z68 system but never tried to run Win 10 on. I do not know
if this would be involved in the problem but it is a possibility.

You Boot Loader shows Flight Signing which I believe is related to the Insider version of Win 10. Are you currently in the Insider program and running that build? Again, no info as to relevance with current situation.

Your EFI partition is showing as your third partition. Can you verify it is the third partition and what the first two partitions are? OEMs set their systems up with variances in partition locations but just wanted to check.

Your Boot Loader shows you have Recovery enabled but no RecoverySequence... Since the Recoverysequence is what starts the Recovery options, do you know why?

What OS did that system originally come with and what was your upgrade path to Win 10?

 

Does/Could the Windows 10 boot loader affect Windows XP ?

I have a multi boot system, two installs of XP and Windows 10.

Everything was working fine on an old Nforce 4 motherboard from 2006 with AMD X2 4200 CPU.

This board finally died just recently and was replaced with a used combo, ASRock 960GC-GS FX motherboard,

AMD FX 4300 CPU and 4 GB's of DDR3. Running regular BIOS with MBR (no uefi/gpt)

Windows 10 took the change of motherboard in it's stride and is working normally. For Windows XP I ran the repair install,

which over wrote the Win 10 boot loader with it's own. I continued testing XP like this for a couple of days. Everything was good.

Then I ran the Win 10 startup recovery and re-implemented Windows 10 boot loader - now the boot menu shows boot

Windows 10 or "earlier versions of Windows" - as it was originally.

Windows 10 still fine, but when I use XP, I'm getting these strange crashes in various programs, for example, avast anti-virus,

Firefox and Tmpgenc mpeg encoder. Looking at the summary for the Tmpgenc and Firefox dumps show "exception illegal instruction".

Here is one: https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/a7e4d91d-b28e-4c54-a8cd-a77492161031

This continued for a few days, while I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what is going on. Finally I run the XP recovery console

"fixboot" to restore the XP boot loader. Now when I use XP everything is back to normal. No more crashes anywhere.

These crashes only occur when XP boots through the Windows 10 boot loader.

Any idea what is going on ?

.

 

If it were me, I would install Macrium Reflect Free. Make a Macrium Rescue DVD, CD or USB flash drive. Make sure you can boot the computer into the Macrium Reflect Free rescue environment. Then back up the EFI System or System Reserved partition(s) onto a USB flash drive or other external storage location/device..

Do the Windows XP repair installation. Reboot the computer into the Macrium Reflect Rescue and restore the EFI system or System Reserved partition(s). If that doesn't work, Macrium Reflect rescue also contains a utility under the restore menu to fix Windows startup problems - that should fix things too.

 

Honestly, my response is just a suggestion, and I apologize if you think it's completely off topic.

Try to only use Windows 10 as your operating system. I'm sure every single program from XP now works with Windows 10. Windows 10 is way more secure than XP, because XP no longer has security updates.

Check this out though: If you want to create some sort of Temporary Workspace for you to boot into to do small things in there, and not have your Windows 10 reflect upon that, then look on the internet on how to install XP, for example, on a big enough removable USB stick, 8 GB or 16 GB or whatever. So whenever you want to use your "Temporary Workspace", plug in your XP USB and boot from it.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. It looks like I'm going to actually buy Windows 10, since after the motherboard replacement
it has lost its "digital license". At least I can step up to the 64 bit version now and install clean.

I picked up an Asrock 960gs-gc with n AMD FX-4300 installed. It was relatively easy to do a mini repair to get XP to boot.
There is a program on the Bart PE CD that sets the hard drive controller back to Standard IDE.
Once that is done the PC boots and I can then take care of the other drivers.

It was crashing in Firefox (xp), and after an automatic dump submission, they tell me in the forum it's something do with
AVX instructions. and an illegal operation. I'm wondering if the motherboard/CPU is not fully compatible with XP.
With that in mind, really don't know if an XP repair would even help.

Sorry to go off topic a little but I've been pulling my hair out on this. I guess i'm up against the clock with using Win 10
in it's non-activated state, so I have to make a decision soon. At least if I',m going to scrap the current Win 10
installation, I probably don't have to worry too much about the XP repair and the boot loader question.

 

An update. Problems with various program crashing in XP were solved by a repair install.

The issue of restoring Windows 10 boot loader is solved by creating the recovery USB drive. This can be done by
searching for the tool in the control panel.