Windows 8 and EasyBCD

[Computer Guru]

I have just finished posting a rather lengthy write-up on our findings regarding the new Windows 8 bootloader, what's new, how it works, and on EasyBCD's support for Windows 8.

The New Windows 8 Bootmenu/Bootloader The NeoSmart Files

If you have anything to contribute to this topic, or have discovered something in conflict with what we've written, please post a comment on the article (or a reply here) to bring it to our attention!

[breaker]

CG,

Nice writeup!

As far as Windows 8, I didn't get to see the new boot manager because I reverted back to a GRUB2 MBR, so now I am curious to see it live.

Anyway, I did break the booting of my Windows 7 and 8 during my process, so I burned the W8CP to a DVD and used it to repair the booting of Windows 7, which is the active and system partition for my various Windows.

Then I used EasyBCD in Windows 7 to add entries for Windows 8 and XP.

However, Windows 8 wouldn't boot winload.exe until I copied the new bootmgr to the root of my system partition (W7).

What happened next? Well, when I chainloaded the Windows system partition from GRUB2 as usual, Windows 8 booted right up without giving me the choice of Windows OS like before with Windows 7.

However, finally copying the (new?) file BOOTNXT from the Windows 8 root to the Windows 7 root gave me the menu for the BCD I had created under Windows 7 using EasyBCD.

I told this story to highlight the BOOTNXT file. I suppose it allows for backward compatibility or whatever.

Well, I don't know if this is new information for you, but there you go.

Thanks for all of your hard work, and thanks to the whole EasyBCD team, it has made life so much nicer for multi-booting various Windows!

breaker

[Computer Guru]

Hey, thanks, breaker. Stick around, it's nice having you here

I've seen the BOOTNXT file, but haven't had time to analyze it's purpose as of yet (it's rather tiny, btw....) as I've been busy with some other projects.
The winload issue is known from the days of Vista - each time MS releases a new version of Windows, BOOTMGR must be replaced with one that recognizes the checksum of winload.exe as being valid (ostensibly to prevent against certain types of malware, but really to prevent modification of Windows). I'm surprised they haven't fixed it to simply recognize digitally signed binaries from Microsoft.

[breaker]

Hi, I borrowed this information from somewhere else on the web, but it certainly applies here:

• The new boot menu is actually a win32 GUI program. It's c:\windows\system32\bootim.exe. You can even execute it in normal windows environment. It is equivalent to execute the command “bcdedit /bootsequence {xxxxx}” to set a temporal boot sequence in the next boot and then reboot.

I ran it from inside Windows 8, interesting.... it is called the immersive boot menu.

[AskaLangly]

Hey.
When you install Windows 8 onto a secondary HDD (not tested primary yet...), after the installation process, boot into your primary. Win8 bootloader appears. Choose Win7. PC resets then boots Win7. (To be honest, I loathe the Win8 bootloader: the reboots). After Win7 shows, do an 'msconfig', and change the boot settings so that Win7 is the default operating system, then set up EasyBCD so you can boot Win8 (as you should have the Win8 entry created by the Win8 setup). After a reboot, the Win7 bootloader will show and then you can boot into Win8 without any security issues. Hope this helps.

[thanhduyttvt1609]

thanks