EasyBCD button: Write MBR?

[Steve17]

I installed XP on a new machine with lots of partitions. I then installed Win7. Neither was installed on the "active" partition, the partition with boot.ini etc. on it.

I copied all the boot.ini, bootmgr etc. stuff to a thumb drive that tries to run bootmgr. (formatted with Win7)

I then installed another XP. Not surprisingly, a regular boot from hard drive now gives me the choice of either XP installation on the startup OS selection menu, but not the Win7 installation.

I can still run Win7 by booting from the thumb drive, but eventually I want to fix the normal boot from hard drive.

I suppose I could get the Win7 selection back by installing another Win7, but I thought I would try doing it with EasyBCD.

So I fire up EasyBCD 1.7.2 and hit the "Manage bootloader" button. I see "Bootloader Installation Options" and "Reinstall the Vista bootloader". So far, so good. But next there is a big fat "Write MBR" button. What's up with that? Isn't it the VBR that I want to write? Also known as volume boot record or partition boot sector, etc.

 

[Terry60]

Hi Steve, welcome to NST.
As you can see in the wiki, it rewrites the bootsector PBR and the MBR, to put the Vista versions back after they've been regressed by XP, but the button's not big enough to fit all that in.
If you still want W7 to retain its own animated startup screen, you can just let it repair the boot itself, by booting the DVD and "repair your computer" / "startup repair" 2 or 3 times.

 

[Coolname007]

You may want to take the thumb drive out of your computer first though, before running Startup Repair.