Bcdedit Windows Xp
Norine Wiltshire
What I can do: I can boot Windows install from the USB drive, and I can boot the Hiren's Boot CD. Although automated Windows repair fails, I can get to command prompt when I boot Windows install from USB drive, and I can see my drive and all my data.
It seems that something is wrong with my /Boot/BCD, so I'm trying to recreate it from scratch. I've tried all the methods detailed here (including Windows repair which fails), and I'm left with the last one (near the bottom of that page). When I type the following command as in the tutorial:
Not directly related to your issue as you resolved it, but rather to your original description (particularly "The requested system device cannot be found." on BCD operations despite all attempts to recreate/rebuild):
I spent two days pulling my hair out, wrestling with this issue (the BCD store was ALWAYS unavailable with this "The requested system device cannot be found." error, no matter what I did), only to find that the problem was simply the USB slot I was plugging my bootable USB stick in. By plugging it into a different (usb 2.0 instead of usb 3.0) slot, the standard repair actions worked fine.
Update: Another user (improvedcomputers) contacted me to confirm that this also happened to them; as all their USB slots were unrecognized by Windows 7 PE they ended up having to pull the drive and perform the repair on another computer.
Update: I had hard time even reinstalling windows on my laptop. From this post I learned and realized the Windows 7 PE does not recognize USB drive. Although it booted from the USB drive image due to some reason it was not able to start up the installation process. After whole day of efforts finally I tried it with DVD and it worked. I am using Lenovo W520
Recreating BCD as in the "nuclear holocaust" chapter of the tutorial I mentioned in my question worked in the end, but with one small modification. I got the idea in this thread. It seems that the message I got was telling me that bcdedit cannot find the BCD store. So, instead of typing this:
The same problem appears when the Windows installation on disk is configured for UEFI boot, but the repair process is attempted from commands stored on a USB drive which has been booted in non-UEFI ("legacy") mode.
So, imagine you have a bootable Windows 8 setup USB drive which cannot be booted in UEFI mode, but only in legacy mode. One might think that one can simply change the BIOS setting from UEFI boot to legacy boot. And, in fact, after this change the USB drive can be booted, and one can access the Windows command prompt, of course. However, in that situation one cannot "repair" the Windows installation on disk which has previously been installed and used in UEFI mode.
In that scenario (boot mode "legacy" and boot from Windows 8 installation USB drive), execution of bootrec /rebuildbcd fails with The requested system device cannot be found. And BCDBoot C:\Windows fails with Failure when attempting to copy boot files.
I had a different cause of and solution to this issue. In my case the problem was that I had used a Windows 7 Enterprise ISO to create a bootable usb flash drive with Unetbootin, per instructions here: -bootable-windows-7-usb-drive.html. Basically, the instructions say to format the usb drive with ntfs and use Unetbootin v494 (outdated) which still had the feature to allow you to use drives formatted with ntfs (this feature disappeared in later versions).
After an hour of forum searching, someone somewhere mentioned "don't use a bootable usb drive as the recovery environment will see that partition table and not the real one on the hard drive," or something to that effect.
Found my USB CD-ROM drive, put the real disk in there, and ran bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /fixboot, and bootrec /rebuildbcd with no issues. Windows then started fine, both from grub and when the secondary hard-drive was chosen from the bios boot list.
I had the same error message when I was trying to repair windows after converting my hard drive from MBR to GPT. When I tried automatic repair, windows even reported the installed version was not a compatible windows version. I found out that the MSI bios had two options for booting from DVD-ROM which looked similar to this:
It would only start the UEFI boot when I manually selected it. Otherwise it would still boot from the DVD-ROM but not in UEFI mode. After I selected UEFI, I could both manually and automatically repair my windows 7 system.
In my case, I got an unbootable windows 10 system (BIOS boot method) after cloning the partitions (sectorwise copy) to a new drive. The system could still boot with the old drive installed, but it booted the installation from the old drive instead of the new drive, so it was clearly referencing the old drive by name or model or something like that.
Usually, you should be able to fix a problem like this by booting from an installation medium, and running bootrec /rebuildbcd - but in this case, the error message The requested system device cannot be found. popped up as bootrec tried to add the new system to the BCD. Also bcdedit exited with a similar error message. The bcd in C:\BOOT\BCD existed (pointing to the old drive), but obviously Windows didn't identify this file as the active BCD. Issuing bcdedit /store C:\boot\bcd indeed was able to list the BCD.
I ended up renaming the folder C:\boot to C:\boot.old and trying bcdboot e:\windows /s c:. This command existed without error, but didn't re-create C:\boot, although the destination was unambigously specified on the command line. It turns out, that the BIOS in that computer seems to support some basic level of EFI booting and booted the windows 10 recovery medium in EFI mode (with no indication of doing something like that in the boot medium select menu, or any possibility to turn EFI or legacy boot on or off). Finally
Boot a Windows 7 x64 install disc and launch Start Up repair, but cancel it before it starts trying to repair, you will see a link for Advanced Options, which will allow you to get to command prompt, you will need to make the 100MB partition active if you made the OS partition active by mistake.
Rebooting a Windows Server 2016 VM in VMware Esxi 6.5 failed with "OS not found". I suspected an update which got installed during shut down. I was not able to fix it with diskpart, bootrec, bcdedit and restore from Backup. It had also nothing to do with EFI (secure boot) or BIOS mode.
Quick backstory: I'm attempting to resolve "unknown errors" that come up trying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Whether or not this issue has anything to do with it doesn't matter, I just want it fixed regardless.
And if that wasn't weird enough, going to bcdedit revealed that apparently my boot configuration store (correct term?) is missing from the default location and is instead in c:\ESD\Windows\Boot\BCD for some reason.
Why this works: Not 100% sure, but it appears that Windows 7 only checks the first drive it discovers in certain situations (such as msconfig's boot tab, running bcdedit in CMD, etc.) despite the fact that it can boot from an out-of-order drive just fine.
I've just upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 8.1 on my partitioned laptop that has Ubuntu 14.04 installed. Grub no longer appeared on boot so I ran boot-repair from an Ubuntu liveUSB. This didn't seem to have any effect. I've checked and secure boot is still disabled.
Log from boot-repair:
So what's next?
Update: I've attempted to use chroot to update grub from my Ubuntu partition. update-grub runs successfully finding both linux and windows boot manager but the process still doesn't have any effect. grub-install complains that it cannot find EFI directory (but I have mounted everything correctly).
Update2: Just discovered that running efibootmgr after chroot into ubuntu shows ubuntu as not being in the boot order at all. I manually changed the order and rebooted to discover that the bootorder was reset. I run in windows: bcdedit /set bootmgr path \EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi But this has no effect either even after reporting 'Operation Successful'.
As pointed out in the comments (by David Faure), the final argument to this command depends on your particular system configuration. You can use this command to determine the correct path for your system:
My wife's machine is older (non-UEFI) and had Ubuntu installed on a logical extended partition. Upgrading to Windows 10 first killed grub so reboots resulted in the "grub rescue" prompt, which I restored with BootRepair from LiveUSB, but my Linux partition was missing! I restored this with parted rescue from LiveUSB, which found and recovered the partition. From there, I mounted the partition from LiveUSB and did a grub-install and was able to boot back into the recovered Ubuntu and Win10. Hope this helps others.
We have a number of answers here providing steps on how they fixed the issue (Loss of Grub menu due to latest Win10 update). Various answers proves the solution isn't unique as the machine configs ain't unique.
Basically, at some point in the upgrade, I ended up with grub going into rescue mode because my debian partition had been wiped in the process and hence the boot files with it (I generally have a separate boot partition but not this time ...). From a look at this link: Windows 10 upgrade led to grub rescue
Anyhow, I fixed the problem by booting on a Win8.1 install external hdd and followed those instructions: -mbr/ (scroll down to win8/8.1). That wiped grub and reinstalled mSoft's boot loader. I then managed to finish the upgrade and reinstalled debian all together since at the time I had not realised it was simply a problem with the partition table not being written correctly. Yet a better solution would be to try and recover your partition table (using testdisk?) and then reinstall/update grub.
I used the rescuetux/supergrubdisk. Booted it from DriveDroid on my android tablet. Then used auto detect rescuetux. Went into the WINDOWS button, hit the betaWindowsMBR repair button. And selected /dev/sda2 ok ok ok. Then it said successful. Now i just booted back into windows uefi menu.
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