Cloned Win7 booting but linked to wrong BCD

doveman

Member
Hi

I have three boot partition which I boot with grub4dos, (hd0,0) which is XP, (hd0,2) which is my old Win7 and I've just restored a True Image Win7 to (hd0,1).

I can boot the restored Win7 fine with the following grub4dos entry:

title Win7 (hd0,1)
hide (hd0,0)
hide (hd0,2)
unhide (hd0,1)
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

which goes to a Win7 boot screen with only one entry (I've set it to skip that now). As you can see, I've hidden the other two boot partitions.

So far so good, but when I open EasyBCD it shows the BCD, with five boot entries, from my old Win7 on (hd0,2). I can load and edit the correct BCD for this windows on (hd0,1) but I need to make sure everything is pointing there, for when I move this install to another HDD with only two boot partitions.

If I go to Control Panel - System - System Properties - Advanced System Settings - Startup and Recovery Settings, it shows the five entries I have in the BCD for my other Win7 installation on HD0,2, so it's not just EasyBCD but I'm hoping someone knows a quick and easy way to fix this without affecting anything else (maybe the Win7 boot repair disc would work, but as it's impossible to hide the other partitions from that, there's always the risk it will mess them up and it overwrites the grub4dos MBR with the Win7 one, which I'd rather avoid).
 
By default EasyBCD looks for the BCD in the "active" partition of the first HDD in the BIOS boot sequence. You can make it use another BCD with the tools > options menu, or you could use "makeactive" in your menu.lst for the (hd0,1) partition
 
By default EasyBCD looks for the BCD in the "active" partition of the first HDD in the BIOS boot sequence. You can make it use another BCD with the tools > options menu, or you could use "makeactive" in your menu.lst for the (hd0,1) partition
Thanks, using "makeactive" sorted it out both for EasyBCD and the Windows settings, so obviously the latter also looks to the Active partition.
 
Last edited:
"Makeactive" is a legacy grub command and only of relevance if you're using that boot loader.
In Windows you can use Disk Manager to set the active flag, but beware of changing it if you're not sure of what you're doing.
It's the indicator used by the MBR to locate the boot files, and if you move it to somewhere else the system will no longer be bootable.
 
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