Getting Current Jan/2/17 Status of Visual BCD 0.9.4 and Repair program

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Peace Man

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Jan 2, 2017, 3:28:51 AM1/2/17
to Visual BCD
Hello to All and Happy New Year,

Is there a timetable on beta/production Visual BCD 0.9.4? Is there some real world documentation on the usage of the products, meaning something good lay people with moderate knowledge can use a 1 - 2 - 3 approach get it installed, running and producing a end result that is easily understood in plain English. I am running several of my own, non-business systems, with lots of storage (over 32TB) and storage devices (12 HDD, 4 SSD, My Cloud Mirror, 8TB Backup Hub plus, etc). I need to go among Windows 7 home prem - Ultimate & 10 Pro - Enterprise, UEFI with GPT AND BIOS with MBR, Linux various, server software and embedded process uses. This requires that I boot conflicting loaders. I learned only here today that Win 10 can boot Win 7 but not the reverse. I have been using EasyBCD and having my boot partitions go crazy. Neosmart's answer to every thing is "just buy our Essential Recovery software and your problems that we caused will be fixed." Now that I know all this, I will not run EasyBCD on my Windows 7 OS'. 

Important Question: Will Visual BCD stop you from mistakes such as trying to Boot Win 10 from a Win 7 OS? How do I put up a guard to prevent the BCD trying to load .EFI or .EXE when it should be using the other, ie, Visual BCD or EasyBCD should not put the wrong type loader in the start up mix for the OS on that partition. If a disk is GPT then only EFI loaders should be used to start the OS' on that disk and if it is MBR, only EXE loaders should be pointed to for that disk and the OS' in partitions on that disk. I do hope that this is clear.

Fortunately for me, I read a lot of articles and did the recover steps on my main Win 7 GPT SSD which I had all the software loaded on for the server. Though I did have backups, that is a very laborious process.

I have not installed Visual BCD 0.9.3 as I am intimidated as to the outcome of this and do not want to again endanger my now working Win 7 and Win 10 OS'.

Thanks and peace to all,
Peace Man

boyans.net

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Jan 3, 2017, 1:11:42 AM1/3/17
to visua...@googlegroups.com
Happy New Year Peace Man,

There is no timetable for next versions of Visual BCD.

Visual BCD Editor is just an interface to BCD. 
It displays everything what's there and you can freely edit everything.

Using the tool you can do all the things you can do with bcdedit.exe but instead of writing command lines
you select, click, edit strings, numbers etc.

You should have some knowledge what you are doing, the same is needed when you use bcdedit.

BCD stuff is not so complicated as it may look.

1. You have a boot manager with its parameters.

2. Then you have loaders with their parameters.

3. Then you have also some settings objects which are common for all other objects and are not changed usually so this part of BCD can be ignored.

A loader describes how you name the OS, where it is(which partition) and what program to use to load the OS.
We have three kind of loaders - one for booting, one for resuming and one for starting recovery - for every installed OS.

Boot manager has a list of boot loaders (=boot menu=displayOrder) and "timeout" to display boot menu.

This is a very short introduction but covers the main parts of BCD.

Usually loader parameters have a descriptive enough symbolic name like "ApplicationDevice" (on which device is the OS), "ApplicationPath" (path to loader executable), "Description" (name of loader as displayed in boot menu).


If you don't understand what you are doing with BCD when changing some object and parameter you can very easily make the system unbootable!

BUT WE HAVE BACKUP functionality. 
So you make a backup and if not happy with edit/change just restore BCD.

To be able to make experiments (if you don't fully understand what you are doing) 
YOU SHOULD HAVE A RECOVERY/INSTALLATION USB or DVD (for every installed OS)
and you should know how to boot it and go to command line.

You need one single bcdedit command to restore BCD:
bcdedit /restore path_to_BCD_backup_file /clean

Then you need to have some understanding of partitions, boot sectors, MBR, 
what is a system(active) partition,
what is EFI System partition,
and what is the boot sequence for BIOS booting and for UEFI booting.

That would be almost everything you need to diagnose and correct a boot problem.

Now the answer to your important question:
Visual BCD Editor will not stop you do any nonsense with BCD BUT 
you can do the nonsense a lot easier than with bcdedit ;)

Microsoft could very easily create a graphical BCD tool but they didn't because usually you don't need bcd editing.

For easy manipulation of complicated BCD stuff Microsoft has created the utility "bcdboot".
Just have a read of bcdboot help.
You can repair/fix BCD with a single command like:
bcdboot c:\windows
You don't usually need a BCD editor for fixing boot problems.

Hope I pointed you in the right direction with this notes.

Don't hesitate to ask if you need some assistance,

Bo

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