Endless Loop in Windows Boot Mgr (trying to run Windows 10)

R

Rich16

Member
Windows 7 on one HD (activated), Windows 10 on a second HD (activated). Both run fine. Installed latest version of EasyBCD (2.3.0.207) to W7. Added the boot drive of W10 (carefully selecting the proper drive as displayed in W7 file mgr). Restarted computer, Windows Boot Mgr comes up and selecting W7 runs things fine. But if I select W10 it goes to an error/warning screen (as follows):

"A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged...
"To start Windows so you can investigate further, press the ENTER key to display the boot menu, press F8 for Advanced Boot Options, and select Last Known Good. If you understand why the digital signature cannot be verified and want to start Windows without this file, temporarily disable driver signature enforcement."
File: winload.exe
Info: Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this file

So I press ENTER as it says which returns me to the Windows Boot Mgr choice screen. Using the keyboard (and without pressing enter) I select W10 and press F8. Unfortunately it doesn't bring up the Advanced Boot Options but instead returns me to the exact same screen with the error/warning message above. In other words, an endless loop.

BTW, if I reboot and enter my computer's setup (prior to the Windows Boot Mgr) and select the HD with W10 it starts W10 just fine. So the problem is with EasyBCD and the Windows Boot Mgr. To hopefully save some time and questions here is everything I did:
1) after installing EasyBCD I clicked Add New Entry. "Type" defaults to Windows Vista/7/8/10. In "Name" field I changed it to Windows 10. In "Drive" field I selected the W10 boot drive that both File Manager and Disk Management see (in my case that's the F:\ drive).
2) that is all. I didn't touch Advanced Settings, BCD Backup/Repair, or BCD Deployment. Also touched nothing in the Files or Tools menus.

Hopefully someone has a means of resolving this. Thanks for your help.
 
One other thing I just thought of which may or may not be of help, my computer has a traditional BIOS, not the more modern UEFI.
 
You can't boot a newer Windows from an older.
The newer version is fully backwards compatible and recognizes all earlier Winload.exe digital signatures as genuine.
The older has no fore-knowledge of future releases and sees the digital signature of a later winload.exe as "fake".
You can only multi-boot a generational mixture of Windows releases from the boot manager of the latest you have.

A workaround if you have a compelling reason to boot from the earlier device (SSD v HDD e.g.) would be to drag and drop the later (bigger) version of bootmgr from W10 onto W7 having renamed the W7 (smaller) version to something else.
 
Terry, thx for your response. I'm not sure I follow some of the things you say so a few questions to clarify:

1) "You can only multi-boot a generational mixture of Windows releases from the boot manager of the latest you have" makes perfect sense now that you say it, and am surprised something that critical is not mentioned on the website in the "Newer Versions of Windows" guide (at the very least in the Troubleshooting section) as many people using the product are going to want to do exactly that (ie, multi-boot various versions of Windows).

2) I have no reason to boot from an earlier O/S and am not sure what you mean by boot from earlier "device" as both W7 and W10 are installed on matching HDD's.

3) Since it appears I mistakenly installed EasyBCD onto W7 instead of W10, which therefore made use of the older bootmgr file in the W7 SYSTEM RESERVED partition instead of the newer bootmgr file in the W10 SYSTEM RESERVED partition, is there a straightforward way to disengage from that older bootmgr file?

4) Instead of copying the W10 bootmgr to the W7 partition I'd rather just install EasyBCD onto W10 and run it from there if that solves the problem. Sounds simple enough assuming it's easy (?) to break the connection between the W7 installation of EasyBCD and the W7 bootmgr.

Basically I have no compelling reason to boot from an earlier "device" (again, I'm not sure what that means unless you are referring to the fact that I installed EasyBCD in W7 instead of W10) but merely want my computer to boot into a Boot Manager that offers a menu of 2 choices: Windows 7 and Windows 10, and whichever I select starts up as it should and becomes the de facto O/S until I reboot my computer the next time.

Thanks again for your help.
 
A follow-up to my previous post.

Please ignore my #2) point above, I now understand what you meant.

Being the curious sort I figured it can't be too hard to break the connection between the existing W7 installation of EasyBCD and the W7 bootmgr as I currently configured it in my original post. While not absolutely necessary I want to do this before I install EasyBCD on my W10 installation, add the older W7 to that boot menu, and boot from that HDD. Anyway, I went into 'Edit Boot Menu', deleted the W10 entry, rebooted the computer to see what would happen (ie, whether it would boot directly into W7 as before or still present a menu) and it displayed a menu with just Windows 7 as the only entry.

That's not what I want so I went back into 'Edit Boot Menu' and deleted the remaining W7 entry, but when attempting to close EasyBCD got this message:

"EasyBCD has detected that there are no entries currently installed. If you exit EasyBCD and restart your computer, it will not boot. Are you sure you want to exit before adding a new entry?"

Needless to say I didn't want that so I went in to 'Add New Entry' and added back the W7 entry just so the computer would boot. But now I've once again got this useless Windows Boot Mgr menu with only one option. Short of setting the Count Down to zero is there any way while still booting the W7 HDD to no longer display the Windows Boot Mgr menu? IOW, like it was before I mistakenly installed EasyBCD in W7 and started messing with it there.

As always, thanks for any help.
 
Saw this after your other thread.
If a single-choice menu is still being presented, it means that there's some minor corruption in the BCD (nothing serious, just a bit of unwanted detritus).
If you're pedantic, you could use EasyBCD to "reset the BCD configuration" and add a new W7 entry, but as long as you can live with the knowledge that there's a metaphorical dirty sock at the back of the BCD, you can just click on the "skip boot menu" option.
I wouldn't ever reset timer to 0. That's cutting your lifeline into the BCD.
Timer =1 will effectively do the same with an entry point for the nimble-fingered.
 
Terry, yes I am pedantic and I do love to tinker. :grinning: Tried resetting the BCD configuration as you suggested, then added a new W7 entry, but when I restarted the computer Windows Boot Mgr showed up once again(!) even tho there was only 1 entry in the boot menu, and to top it off had this lovely message:
Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause... blah blah blah
File: \Boot\BCD
Info: The Windows Boot Configuration Data file does not contain a valid OS entry.

Have no idea why as I was careful to add back the W7 entry, and EasyBCD would've given me a stern warning message when exiting if I hadn't. Anyway, enough was enough, I have no idea how things got corrupted in the BCD but they obviously had, so I restored a recent total drive backup of W7, booted directly into it to be sure, then rebooted into W10 to get things going properly.

Because of all the problems I had with my mistaken installation of EasyBCD in W7 I carefully:
1) using bcdedit exported the contents of the system store to a file
2) using EasyBCD backed up bootloader settings to a file (same size output file as #1 but slightly different contents)
3) in SYSTEM RESERVED made a backup copy of the bootmgr file

As they say, paranoia runs deep... With that preparation backup work done I went into W10 EasyBCD and added the W7 entry to the boot menu, rebooted, reset the default boot HDD, and held my breath. No problemo, the Windows Boot Mgr came up with the W10 and W7 entries, tried each one in succession and all is well.

Thanks much for your posts, you have been tremendously helpful in my understanding of this whole process.
 
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