My computer has three physical hard drives. Two of which are running windows 7 and one drive was cloned off the other. Therefore both have Easybcd running on them. However, when I installed the program, before I cloned the new drive, I installed it onto my third drive which is drive D where I install most of my software. Thus, both the other hard drives running windows 7 and easybcd share the D drive. A week ago, Microsoft tech support was working on my one drive on another problem and managed to mess it up so it would no longer start up normally without going to the blue screen of death. When they were done for the day they left it that way but then I was no longer able to boot up on the other drive either. My question is, would Easybcd sharing the D drive with two different boot drives leave them both corrupted? I'm still battling with MS trying to get them to fix just one of the drives so it will boot up normally and not just in safe mode.
EasyBCD on two cloned drives
- Thread starter sailored
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EasyBCD is a completely passive app.
Its presence (any number of times) has no effect on the system.
It merely alters the contents of the BCD store(s) when you tell it to.
Your problem would appear to be that the broken OS was controlling the boot, and therefore any damage done to the boot files there will prevent it from booting the secondary system.
Depending on how you cloned W7, you might be able to boot the second OS by just changing the BIOS to select that HDD before the broken one in the boot sequence.
If that doesn't work, it could be that the "cloned" BCD still contains the UIDs that describe the original OS. (as a true clone must)
In that case running "startup repair" from your W7 DVD should fix the BCD UIDs of the clone to point to the new HDD instead of the old.
Its presence (any number of times) has no effect on the system.
It merely alters the contents of the BCD store(s) when you tell it to.
Your problem would appear to be that the broken OS was controlling the boot, and therefore any damage done to the boot files there will prevent it from booting the secondary system.
Depending on how you cloned W7, you might be able to boot the second OS by just changing the BIOS to select that HDD before the broken one in the boot sequence.
If that doesn't work, it could be that the "cloned" BCD still contains the UIDs that describe the original OS. (as a true clone must)
In that case running "startup repair" from your W7 DVD should fix the BCD UIDs of the clone to point to the new HDD instead of the old.
I have run startup repair several times. I finally reloaded W7 SP1 onto the original drive which I had cloned from. I really want to save the new drive since it has all of my programs and up to date documents on it. Is there a way to copy the boot information from the old drive with the new OS on it to the old drive with the corrupt boot sector?
If you have a new fully functional W7 you should just be able to add another W7 entry to the new BCD pointing to the cloned drive.
The BCD entry points to Windows\System32\winload.exe (the boot loader). That drive won't need a working boot sector. The boot manager/BCD on the new OS will have done all that's needed to get that copy of W7 running.
The BCD entry points to Windows\System32\winload.exe (the boot loader). That drive won't need a working boot sector. The boot manager/BCD on the new OS will have done all that's needed to get that copy of W7 running.