Seeking help with 8.1 boot recovery

[oaklandz]

Hi, Bo Yans (or other very capable person) how can I write/skype off the public message board to discuss a technical question for 8.1 boot? In my pretty new Acer Aspire V7 Ultrabook, my HDD boot configuration failed suddenly, without my making any changes to anything. I am using another (previously cloned) system drive and with the failed boot drive attached externally, I can confirm that all partitions, file tables, etc are healthy. With more than 25 years of troubleshooting windows behind me, I have a lot of knowledge and experience. But with 8.1 UEFI HDD+SSD etc... I cannot repair this boot configuration - I do not have the knowledge. I would like to use Teamviewer to screen share and get help to get my drive boot-up configuration fixed. I have a lot more to explain about what I tried, and the progress I made. ANYONE who can help?! ... my email is my user ID + @usa.net. thank you.

[boyans.net]

Hi oaklanz,

As you stated you have some Windows knowledge.

Using UEFI the boot sequence is:

Firmware boot manager (in PROM) at startup scans all bootable devices and looks on all hard disks for an EFI System Partition (ESP).

if it finds ESP on disk it scans for a bootable file (.efi) in all subfolders of "\EFI" (like \EFI\Microsoft, \EFI\Ubuntu). The fallback path is always "\EFI\boot\bootx64.efi" - so this file should exist.

The same is for remove-able drives - the EFI boot folder should be on a FAT32 partition and the boot file in \EFI\boot.

The best utility for making a disk bootable is "bcdboot.exe" - it writes boot related files to the specified disk.

In your case you must ensure that your disk has

a) an UEFI System Partition (ESP) - default size 100 MB - use Disk Management or "diskpart.exe".

b) a Microsoft Reserved Partition (MRP) - default size 128 MB

Then you can map ESP using "mountvol.exe".

Then you execute "bcdboot.exe" specifying as source drive where is Windows installed and as destination ESP.

Utilities diskpart, mountvol and bcdboot are available in Windows Recovery, in Windows PE and in Windows itself.

Hope this helps.

In case you don't succeed using above steps you can send an email to "boyans.gm" at gmail.com