Can't edit BCD on flash drive

S

Steve17

Active Member
EasyBCD seems to want to only use the BCD on drive C. I would like to edit the BCD on my flash drive. On the "Change Settings" window, it gives me a list of drive letters to choose from. It does not give me the flash drive, even if I booted from it. If there is no Boot folder on the "C" disk, EasyBCD won't run.

Windows 7 seems to have the same problem. In the Startup and Recovery window, it only shows me the BCD from the "C" partition, even if I booted from the flash drive. If there is no Boot folder on the "C" partition, Windows 7 shows nothing in the Startup and Recovery window.

What I really would like is a program that would tell me if the VBR on the flash drive is set to run ntldr or bootmgr. I'm beginning to think there is no program in the world that will do that. Maybe I will write one.
 
Thanks Justin. That allowed me to edit, but it made me nervous.

When I made a change to the name of an entry, the change happened, but immediately afterward a window popped up saying there were problems.

The flash drive works okay anyway.
 

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I think the reason for the message is this thumb drive was formatted with XP. When first formatted, it would run ntldr at bootup and allowed me to run my XP installs. I then used VistaBootPro to re-write the VBR so it would run bootmgr at bootup. That allowed me to boot up Win7 and XP. I could have probably accomplished the same thing with EasyBCD.

One of these days I'll find a reliable way to set up a thumb drive so it will run everything. Actually my "thumb drives" are just old SD cards in a USB reader/writer.

The full size SD cards haven't given me much trouble. This particular one is a micro SD card. For whatever reason, when I formatted it with Win7, I was able to run Win7, but when I tried running "Earlier versions of Windows", ntldr would give a "Fatal error 1 reading boot.ini".

Just to be clear, I don't run any OS from a thumb drive, although I do have a UBCD4win installed on one. I just like to copy the boot files (boot.ini etc.) to a bootable device other than the hard drive, in case these files get clobbered or my first hard drive gets sick.
 
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