Edit BCD on a different drive

M

_MiSt_

Member
Hi Guys,

I'm a first-time poster here on NeoSmart, however, I've been a satisfied user of EasyBCD since its inception.

Anyway, for some days now I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to coerce EasyBCD to edit a BCD store that is located on another drive.

Dropping to the command line this seems to be quite easily solved by using the /store argument:

bcdedit /store d:\Boot\BCD ...

Is there any way to do this with EasyBCD as well? I already tried to pass an /store argument, but this doesn't seem to work...any ideas?

Thanks! :smile:

Michael
 
What version of EasyBCD are you using?

Terry's advice should work just fine with EasyBCD 1.7.2, but I think that particular feature is broken in 2.0 beta build 63; though build 64 open in Visual Studio right now fixes that :smile:
 
Thanks for your replies :smile:

Mahmoud: I'm using EasyBCD 2.0 build 63 on a Windows 7 system - v1.7.2 doesn't seem to work.

Terry: thanks for the tip with File/Select; regrettably, this does not work for me...I guess I should have explained myself better: I'm currently running a triple-boot configuration (OSX, Win7, Ubuntu) using the Chameleon 2.0 boot loader.

This works all nice - however, as the active entry in the MBR is now the OSX HFS+ partition (where the Chameleon bootloader resides) Windows' BCD editor exits with an error:

"The boot configuration data store could not be opened."

If I provide bcdedit.exe with the /store argument it works perfectly nonetheless. Therfore, I would really need a way to somehow pass the same information to EasyBCD on its command line...

Is there any way to do this?

Michael
 
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EasyBCD looks for the BCD on the "active" partition, which is probably not the case if you're using a different bootloader.
Try setting W7 "active" in disk management before starting EasyBCD. Then when you've done what you want, set the Active flag back where it was.
I'm hoping CG will change it in a future build to locate the BCD via "system" rather than "active". For 99.9% of users they're the same thing, but some of us (me included) have a problem because we have unconventional boots.
 
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Terry, build 64 will prompt the user to manually select a BCD store when it fails to load the BCD from the active partition.

I cannot change it load from System instead of Active, because of problems when loading it from a secondary OS. For instance, in a dual-boot between Vista and XP with XP as the boot drive, from within XP loading the BCD from either the System or the Active drive will work just fine. But from Vista, you'd need to load it from the Active drive and not the System drive for it to work.

Manually selecting the BCD store at run-time is probably the easiest way of working around this.... though I'm open to any and all suggestions, of course.

I've considered having it auto-scan all local drives for \boot\bcd if it fails to find it on the active drive; but am still considering the merits and drawbacks of such a solution.
 
Your solution sounds fine CG.
As long as there's some way for me to start the program without fiddling with the HDD flags, I don't mind how it's implemented.
You're right about "unintended consequences" of course. If I were to run Easy from my current XP, it would find the BCD on neither the active nor the system partition. (fail to find more correctly).
My set up has a BCD on Vista with a single entry, ditto on W7, and a one entry boot.ini on XP, with the active partition being a tiny one, containing only HnS grub and menu.lst, so each OS is both "boot" and "system" when it's running, but only W7 is ever active (because it's on a different HDD)
 
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Computer Guru said:
What version of EasyBCD are you using?

Terry's advice should work just fine with EasyBCD 1.7.2, but I think that particular feature is broken in 2.0 beta build 63; though build 64 open in Visual Studio right now fixes that :smile:
Click to expand...

You sure its broken in 63? I did some testing (loaded up the BCD store from a mounted ISO of Vista) and I was able to "load it" for viewing, unless changes arent being made correctly.
 
Terry: your tip to temporarily switch the active partition did it...why didn't I think of this myself :?

CG: that's good news, I'm eagerly awaiting build 64 then. At least I got EasyBCD working now - using bcdedit from the command line is so much more hassle.

Anyway, thanks for your hard work - I really appreciate it :happy:
 
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