Windows boot manager error

Rikki

Member
I have EasyBCD 2.2 installed on a Vista drive to dual-boot Vista and Win 7. They are on two separate hard drives. This has worked without problem for a long time, but the other day I was playing with the EasyBCD settings and I unintentionally did something I cannot seem to undo.

I don’t know what I changed, but the result is that Win 7 now produces an error if I try to boot from the EasyBCD menu, but it boots normally if I don’t use EasyBCD. The Vista drive works as before. EasyBCD is installed on the Vista drive.

The EasyBCD menu appears on boot-up, with the options to boot Vista or Win 7. If I choose Vista it starts normally. If I choose Win 7, I get a Windows boot manager error that a recent change has resulted in it being signed incorrectly or damaged. I also see a Winload.exe message that the digital signature for the file cannot be verified. I have tried removing and replacing the entries but it makes no difference. As I said, the Win 7 drive boots normally on its own. I only get the error if I try to start it from EasyBCD.

Can anyone explain to me what is going on here, or point me in the right direction to figure this out? Thanks for any help.
 
You cannot boot a newer version of Windows from an older version's bootmgr.
Boot W7 and add a Vista entry to its BCD.
That will work.
Vista cannot boot W7/8/8.1/10 (or any future release)
All OSs bootmgrs are fully backward compatible. (i.e. they recognize the digital signatures of their own and all earlier Winload.exe)
None of them are prescient and are not coded to know in advance what a future OS's digital signature will be.
 
Thanks for the reply. I will do what you suggest. I do not understand how it worked before, though. When I originally set it up, which was a few years ago, I installed EasyBCD on the Vista drive and booted the Win7 drive from there. I didn't know any better but it always worked fine until the recent problem. However, if it works now from the Win 7 drive I am happy. Thanks again.
 
OK, now I am completely confused. I tried to follow your advice but could not get a drive letter for the Vista drive. I checked under disk management and it came up as a recovery partition. I can boot the drive from the BIOS so I did that and checked it again and it shows as an EISA partition and I cannot assign a drive letter to it so EasyBCD won't work.

The Vista drive came out of an old computer I got from a friend and the OS must have been OEM. I never checked but I know it came with the computer and was legal. There was no DVD. At some point I upgraded it to SP2. I wanted to keep it because of some hard to replace software on it.

I don't know how, but I was able to install EasyBCD on it to boot both it and a seperate Win7 drive. This has worked well for a long time. Then I started get BSOD errors and other random issues. I concluded the drive was failing and cloned it to a new drive. That has worked fine for the past months but then I did something with EasyBCD that screwed everything up and now I have the problem I have described here. I don't remember for certain, but I think I was playing with the EasyBCD deployment setting.

Previously the Vista drive did have a drive letter assigned to it regardless of whether I booted from it or Win 7. When I booted Win7 I could see and access the Vista drive from Explorer. Somehow that has now all changed and the only thing that is different is whatever EasyBCD did. I am trying to gain insight into what it possibly could have done to see if there is any way to put things back the way they were. I can still boot the Vista drive from the BIOS when I need to, but I would really like to fix whatever happened.
 
Never mind, I solved it. I just had to change the partition type back to a normal partition. I think it must have somehow got changed when things went wrong, and then the OEM business confused me, but changing it back fixed it and now I have working dual-boot from the Win7 drive. Thanks again for your help.
 
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