General windows 10 BCD replacement question

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fish72

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Hello,

This is my first post, And I hope it is posted in the right place.
I'm a computer technician of many years and NOT a big fan of windows 10 in general.
On several occasions in the past year and a half, I had several windows 10 system's I've built, giving me the BCD 14C BSOD upon boot, And I've fixed it via several bootrec commands or 3rd party tools.
I am new to EasyBCD and used it succesfully for the 1st time today when encountered the BCD 14C BSOD again.
What I did is :
1. Booted gandalf WinPe image and ran EasyBCD
2. Reset BCD configuration
3. Re-create/repair boot files
4. Added new entry and selected the proper boot drive

I have a question :
If I install fresh/Restore image of windows 10 on a new computer, Will it be better to run to steps 1-4 just to make sure the BCD is properly configured and make a BCD backup just "in case" ?
Or it better no to mess with fresh install and just make a BCD backup ?

I'm asking this because I'm afraid that maybe imaging the windows to another drive might be causing the BCD errors from time to time, And maybe creating it anew will prevent it from re-occuring ?

Thank you
 
Cloning your OS to a new drive will certainly give you boot problems.
Despite appearances, there are no disk letters in the BCD.
Partitions are addressed in the BCD with a combination of the unique drive signature and the partition offset from the start of the HDD hashed into a human-unintelligible UID.
To make life easier for you, both in reading where something is and in instructing where you wish to place something, EasyBCD translates the UID into a drive letter using the registry map of the system on which it is running (the same map which assigns the letters in Explorer)
You can appreciate that cloning an OS to a new device results in the partition's device signature not matching the BCD entry, so the boot will attempt to locate the original device rather than the new one.
"Startup repair" is the traditional fix for a cloned OS, but EasyBCD (if you have some way of running it with a non-booting system) will do the job as you've discovered.
 
"Startup repair" is the traditional fix for a cloned OS, but EasyBCD (if you have some way of running it with a non-booting system) will do the job as you've discovered.

Thank you so much Terry for your detailed explanation.
If the system seems to work well after cloning, Is it ok to do those steps within windows :

1. Install EasyBCD
2. Reset BCD configuration
3. Re-create/repair boot files
4. Added new entry and selected the proper boot drive

Or is it better to perform it from a livecd (Like gandalf's or another winpe) ?
 
If the PC boots OK after cloning then there's no need to reset/recreate the BCD.
It must be OK if it correctly booted the OS (or am I misunderstanding what you mean?)
(btw some "cloning" software actually corrects the BCD as part of the copying process, so technically it's not a true clone, just a sibling. If you are only getting this problem sometimes, not each time you clone an OS, then perhaps it's a function of which partition manager and which function of that software you're using)
 
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I use Easeus todo backup workstation to make a "perfect" image of windows 10 in order to restore to image to new computers that I build.
The workstation paid version, Have a feature called "universal restore" which adapts the hardware changes when I restore the image to a different system than the one it was created on.
few of the systems I've restored the image to, gave me the BCD BSOD after few months of working well, And I suspected it might have to do with faulty BCD that was created by the restore process.
I never had any problems with windows 7 restored system, And usually I install windows 10 disks in MBR and not UEFI mode, But since it happened as I recall on 3 of my windows 10 restored systems in the past year or so, I was quite bothered by it.
Easeus support wrote me that as far as they know, There's no need to touch the BCD on the restored system, And so is what you are saying in your last post, So I guess the BCD errors has something to do with power loss/ Windows update and there's not much I can do about it.
Anyway it's great to have the EasyBCD tool, to speed up the BCD fixing process when things like that happens.

Thank you
 
I use Easeus todo backup workstation to make a "perfect" image of windows 10 in order to restore to image to new computers that I build.
The workstation paid version, Have a feature called "universal restore" which adapts the hardware changes when I restore the image to a different system than the one it was created on.
few of the systems I've restored the image to, gave me the BCD BSOD after few months of working well, And I suspected it might have to do with faulty BCD that was created by the restore process.
I never had any problems with windows 7 restored system, And usually I install windows 10 disks in MBR and not UEFI mode, But since it happened as I recall on 3 of my windows 10 restored systems in the past year or so, I was quite bothered by it.
Easeus support wrote me that as far as they know, There's no need to touch the BCD on the restored system, And so is what you are saying in your last post, So I guess the BCD errors has something to do with power loss/ Windows update and there's not much I can do about it.
Anyway it's great to have the EasyBCD tool, to speed up the BCD fixing process when things like that happens.

Thank you

Hi all, after a few years I can confirm that Easeus todo backup is the real problem with 14C BSOD !!!!!!!!!!! On all PCs where it's installed when there's a power loss most of the time you get boot error 14c. I made lots of tests and I'm sure of this! The problem is present in all version of Todo but only under Windows 10, with 7 and 8 all is ok. Didn't find a solution, except to replace Todo with Macrium on more than 100 PCs GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
 
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