Coolname007
Distinguished Member
Ok, I mentioned in another thread that I had PC-BSD installed on an external USB hard drive, and was wanting to boot it with the W7 boot manager, by adding an entry for it in EasyBCD, but Windows wasn't reading the disk correctly. Well, long story short, I got Windows to read the disk correctly (by using Testdisk to create a GPT style partition table) now, and so I was able to add a PC-BSD entry to the W7 boot menu with EasyBCD, pointing it at the 3rd partition (approx. 20 GBs in size) on the disk, which I know contains PC-BSD, though there seems to be an issue with EasyBCD not detecting the filesystem right. But anyway, I went ahead and rebooted (with the USB HD still connected, and mounted), then selected the PC-BSD entry in the boot menu, and pressed Enter. But now, it gave me like 3 options. One of them was Boot, which I clicked right away, which just brought me back to W7's boot menu, I don't remember what the first one was, but I next clicked the second option called "PXE". BIG MISTAKE!! That brought me to a screen saying no boot device, and to insert boot disk and press enter. Since I didn't want to do that, I pressed Ctrl + Alt + Delete to restart, thinking that would bring me back to W7's boot menu...but nope, I was wrong. It doesn't. Each time I restart, and each time I turn off and turn back on my computer, it comes back to that same PXE screen, asking me for a boot disk, and there's no way to get past it except by inserting a boot disk, so I inserted my BootIt NG disk, entered Partition Work, and now all of my partitions are missing on my main drive!! I only see free space on my hard drive. But I'm thinking (and hoping, of course...) that its probably just not loading the hard drive because its getting interrupted by that PXE screen. But just in case the PXE thing screwed up my disk's MBR or something, I went ahead and inserted the W7 installation disk, booted from it, and tried Startup Repair. It doesn't even see my OS. It says "Unknown OS on Unknown", but I went ahead and ran it anyway (once), and so it completed doing its thing, and asked me to restart. But when I did that, once more loaded into Windows Recovery Environment (this time doing "bootrec /fixmbr" from Command Prompt) and tried booting from the hard disk, I still get the PXE screen, so obviously it didn't fix anything.
So..I decided, it might be a good idea to find out what PXE is, so I googled it, and learned it is a Preboot Execution Environment which is an environment to "boot computers using a network interface independently of data storage devices (like hard disks) or installed operating systems".
So now that I know what it is, I'm wondering how to disable it, and get back to my normal boot from my hard disk, now that I accidentally started it up from PC-BSD's boot manager...
Any ideas??
Thanks in advance.
So..I decided, it might be a good idea to find out what PXE is, so I googled it, and learned it is a Preboot Execution Environment which is an environment to "boot computers using a network interface independently of data storage devices (like hard disks) or installed operating systems".
So now that I know what it is, I'm wondering how to disable it, and get back to my normal boot from my hard disk, now that I accidentally started it up from PC-BSD's boot manager...
Any ideas??
Thanks in advance.
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