boot.ini entries appear in BCD boot menu

nothingworks

New Member
Hi. I'm a bit confused about how ntldr and bootmgr contents work together.

If I may start from the top, I decided to reconfigure a machine to carry several flavours of Windows on a SATA drive, as well as a spare IDE drive. The partitions, file sytems, and OSes are as follows:
C: hdd0: Win98 (FAT32)
D: hdd0: WinXP #1 (NTFS)
E: hdd0: Win 7 RC (NTFS)
F: optical drive
G: hdd1: WinXP #2 (NTFS)

1) I installed Win98 onto C. All is good.

2) I installed XP onto D. After this, I had a dual-boot menu managed by ntldr showing the following:
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Microsoft Windows
3) So far, so good. I then installed Win 7 RC onto E. After this, I had a multi-boot menu managed by bootmgr showing the following:
Earlier Version of Windows
Windows 7
Microsoft Windows
4) I'll get to that "Microsoft Windows" option in a moment. I edited my boot.ini to clean up the original list to show the following:
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Microsoft Windows 98 SE
Microsoft Windows Recovery Console
After doing this, the BCD menu showed the following:​
Earlier Version of Windows
Windows 7
Microsoft Windows 98 SE
Microsoft Windows Recovery Console
First of all, why do the boot.ini entries (Win 98 in step #3, then Win 98 and the recovery console in step #4) appear in the BCD boot list? They are clearly lifted from the boot.ini menu, but selecting them results in a dead end. Is the presence of those entries a side-effect of chainloading from boot.ini to BCD?

I ran Windows 7 and ran easyBCD, and even though four entries appear on the BCD boot menu, easyBCD indicates that there are two entries: earlier version of Windows and Windows 7. I guess for whatever reason the BCD boot menu is being "tricked," easyBCD is also being fooled?

It's not the end of the world because I essentially have the expected boot option behaviour: at the BCD menu, I either pick Windows 7, or elect to boot a legacy OS; selecting a legacy OS will give me all the boot.ini options. It just kind of bothers me that whatever changes I make to boot.ini, remnants will appear in the BCD menu. I plan on putting another installation of XP on the last partition/second hard drive, and I suspect after I clean up boot.ini to show "Microsoft Windows XP Professional (instance #2)", that will also appear in the BCD boot menu.

Any ideas? Thanks for reading.
 
The BCD is designed (by Microsoft, not us) to show "fake" entries that display the contents of boot.ini by default. I'm not sure how you can get them to not show up, though.
 
I had this problem. You cant get the recovery console entry to go away unfortunately unless you actually take the line out of boot.ini. If the entry for recovery console in Vista's bootloader works what you can do is set the timeout to 0 in boot.ini to boot XP immediately and than just leave it alone.
 
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