EasyBCD still complains about EFI after 'successful' EasyRE repair

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BleauxHard

Member
As the title states, EasyBCD is still griping about being in EFI mode after EasyRE has 'successfully' repaired the windows 8.1 boot.
Now, how do I go about making EasyBCD not gripe, and actually do what I need it to, ie allow me to boot to linux, or anything else for that matter, because I have paid for EasyRE twice now, due to the "EasyBCD and UEFI" support article claiming EasyRE could "convert your existing installation to be bootable in both UEFI/GPT and BIOS/MBR mode in-place".
Admittedly, one of those i my fault, I forgot I had bought it already, and have no Idea what I did with the disk image, however, if it had done the job in the first place, I would not have needed it again, and would not have purchased a second copy.

PS. just to head off the replies telling me to go read the EasyBCD UEFI support article, I already have, i took it's advice, disabled secure boot, enabled 'Legacy Only' boot mode, purchased and ran EasyRE, and still have this issue.
Also, this is the only issue I've had with EasyBCD since I started using it years ago. What baffles me, is that I've been running windows 8.1 and linux dual-booted on this UEFI machine for years, with non-legacy boot enabled, and EasyBCD used to work just fine, then I update to the latest version and it starts complaining at me about EFI being enabled.
 
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It's just informing you that those facilities available under BIOS/MBR have been disabled by MS under UEFI.
There's nothing that you, I or EasyBCD can do about it.
 
And that's lovely, but what about EasyRE being able to "convert your existing installation"?
because from what I can tell, as a long time Linux user and computer repair tech, there's nothing revolutionary in EasyRE, I have all the same tools on my other bootable Linux flash drives, albeit much less automated, and there was definitely no converting done to anything on my machine after running EasyRE. So what exactly is it supposed to have done, and can I do the same manually using readily available Linux or windows tools?
 
Presumably that refers to EasyRE being able to revert a UEFI install to a legacy BIOS, but since I've never used, or had cause to use EasyRE I can't really offer any useful advice on that product, support for which is all by email to the address specified with the download.
I can give you a bit of background on its genesis though.
Neosmart used to host a copy of the Windows repair disc, which is freely available to all Windows owners who take the precaution of creating one from Control Panel > Backup & Restore > Create repair disc.
It's not necessary of course if you installed Windows yourself, because the installation DVD does the same job too, but many OEM PC users, who'd failed to make a copy suddenly came to regret it when their PC stopped booting.
As I said, Neosmart helped them out by hosting a copy on their server; that was until MS threatened legal action against Neosmart for infringing MS copyright by offering a free product for free ! (Go figure)
Not wishing to be bankrupted by the men in suits, EasyBCD's author took down the hosted copy, but decided to delve around in the Windows internal boot process and replicate what "repair your computer" > "repair startup" was doing using Linux to avoid litigation and provided that as an alternative.
Having gone to the trouble of writing a Linux OS to do that, he decided to bundle other useful open source programs which could help out in a number of other broken PC scenarios to make the product more useful.
Those additional extras are what you refer to here
BleauxHard said:
I have all the same tools on my other bootable Linux flash drives, albeit much less automated,
Click to expand...
but none of those will do what EasyRE's original purpose was.
The reason I've never used it or had the need to is that I have installation media for just about every Windows version since 95, so can fix a broken boot using MS code if I need to.
Check with the email support people if my opening remark is correct, and how to do it if it's not obvious.
If you want a UEFI boot though, you'll just have to live with the fact that MS disabled a lot of previously available functions in the bootmgr.efi version.
 
It's not that I necessarily want a UEFI boot, my operating system is installed on a 6Tb drive, which requires a GPT partition scheme, which windows requires UEFI to boot from, apparently.
But as I said before, what baffles me is that I've had this rig for years, been using EasyBCD just fine, and after an update to EasyBCD, it suddenly starts whining about windows having locked things down, but windows hasn't changed, as I've had the entire windows update toolchain locked down to prevent bad updates from sneaking in.
My suspicion, regarding how the software is supposed to work is that it might be installing either grub or the windows legacy bootloader somewhere and configuring the system to boot from that, in order to bypass the requirement for UEFI, then chainloading the BCD-based bootloader from there.
 
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