Dear NeoSmart Support Representative:
I purchased EasyRE to do ONE thing: to get a Win10 o/s SSD - which WAS in a MULTI-BOOT system - to boot on its own. Here are the particulars:
1) This is on my son's PC in Phoenix, AZ while I'm helping him remotely from home here in Philadelphia, PA.
2) Win10 was on the 5th drive on his system, which also booted to drives with Win7 and WinXP, and in addition, had 2 data drives.
3) Win10 booted as Drive G: on a 4tb GPT SSD, while the other 4 drives (C:, D:, E:, & F:, (HDD's) are MBR.
3a) My intent from WAY back around 2008 for my son and daughter, was for them to be able to boot into EITHER WinXP or Win7 and the drive letters of ALL of their drives would remain the same in all o/s's.
4) Compatibility Support Module Enabled, Secure Boot set to "Other OS".
**********
5) After 'PSU failure', 4 of his 5 drives were COMPLETELY fried, leaving only his Win10 drive unscathed.
6) We tried using EasyBCD to install/change boot parameters of his Win10 drive without success.
**********
7) Here at home, I cloned a 4tb GPT Win10 drive which is booting fine as Drive D: from one of my systems and again used EasyBCD to attempt to get it to boot by itself on a test system - without success. (Tried all combinations of CSM & Secure Boot settings.)
8) Purchased EasyRE, re-cloned the drive to assure that any changes EasyBCD made wouldn't be a factor. Ran EasyRE on the drive, which indicated a successful procedure. Drive still wouldn't boot - again - tried all combinations of CSM & Secure Boot settings.
9) Got ANOTHER hard drive, set it up as MBR, Active, NTFS. Switched the Win10 Drive's SATA cable to the MBR drive, RE_CLONED the un-altered GPT Win10 image to the drive ( D: ), and plugged a second SATA cable from the GPT Win10 drive the next SATA port and assured that UEFI prioritized the MBR drive. Installed BCD files using EasyBCD and configured it to boot the Win10 GPT drive ( D: ).
10) System booted fine past the Win10 logo/startup screen, but only made it to a completely black screen with a still-live mouse cursor, no desktop, no icons, Ctrl-Alt-Del did nothing, Alt-F4 did nothing, (Shift-Win-Ctrl-"B" only just centered the cursor, but screen was still black and unresponsive), could only reset or hold power button. Again - tried all CSM and Secure Boot settings without success.
10a) Even tried removing enough non-system data to get it comfortably under 2tb, then converted it to MBR, turned on CSM, set Secure Boot to "Other OS", ran EasyRE...still black screen with cursor. Tried to straighten things out with EasyBCD, still black screen with cursor.
11) This is where I am right now. If I can't get this to work here at home, I can't hope to help my son get his system running again without NEW Windows, Drivers & Configurations, Reinstalling ALL His Applications, etc, - pain...
Please help us! What did we miss? What should I try? Can this even be done?? I've done something SIMILAR before - taking a multi-boot o/s drive which was MBR with drive letter C: - and got that to boot BY ITSELF on another system by just using EasyBCD - easy-peasy! Then I converted it to GPT and it still booted up with no problems at all. Can EasyRE or any other utility that you produce or know of anywhere - help us to accomplish our goal? Thank you very much!
I purchased EasyRE to do ONE thing: to get a Win10 o/s SSD - which WAS in a MULTI-BOOT system - to boot on its own. Here are the particulars:
1) This is on my son's PC in Phoenix, AZ while I'm helping him remotely from home here in Philadelphia, PA.
2) Win10 was on the 5th drive on his system, which also booted to drives with Win7 and WinXP, and in addition, had 2 data drives.
3) Win10 booted as Drive G: on a 4tb GPT SSD, while the other 4 drives (C:, D:, E:, & F:, (HDD's) are MBR.
3a) My intent from WAY back around 2008 for my son and daughter, was for them to be able to boot into EITHER WinXP or Win7 and the drive letters of ALL of their drives would remain the same in all o/s's.
4) Compatibility Support Module Enabled, Secure Boot set to "Other OS".
**********
5) After 'PSU failure', 4 of his 5 drives were COMPLETELY fried, leaving only his Win10 drive unscathed.
6) We tried using EasyBCD to install/change boot parameters of his Win10 drive without success.
**********
7) Here at home, I cloned a 4tb GPT Win10 drive which is booting fine as Drive D: from one of my systems and again used EasyBCD to attempt to get it to boot by itself on a test system - without success. (Tried all combinations of CSM & Secure Boot settings.)
8) Purchased EasyRE, re-cloned the drive to assure that any changes EasyBCD made wouldn't be a factor. Ran EasyRE on the drive, which indicated a successful procedure. Drive still wouldn't boot - again - tried all combinations of CSM & Secure Boot settings.
9) Got ANOTHER hard drive, set it up as MBR, Active, NTFS. Switched the Win10 Drive's SATA cable to the MBR drive, RE_CLONED the un-altered GPT Win10 image to the drive ( D: ), and plugged a second SATA cable from the GPT Win10 drive the next SATA port and assured that UEFI prioritized the MBR drive. Installed BCD files using EasyBCD and configured it to boot the Win10 GPT drive ( D: ).
10) System booted fine past the Win10 logo/startup screen, but only made it to a completely black screen with a still-live mouse cursor, no desktop, no icons, Ctrl-Alt-Del did nothing, Alt-F4 did nothing, (Shift-Win-Ctrl-"B" only just centered the cursor, but screen was still black and unresponsive), could only reset or hold power button. Again - tried all CSM and Secure Boot settings without success.
10a) Even tried removing enough non-system data to get it comfortably under 2tb, then converted it to MBR, turned on CSM, set Secure Boot to "Other OS", ran EasyRE...still black screen with cursor. Tried to straighten things out with EasyBCD, still black screen with cursor.
11) This is where I am right now. If I can't get this to work here at home, I can't hope to help my son get his system running again without NEW Windows, Drivers & Configurations, Reinstalling ALL His Applications, etc, - pain...
Please help us! What did we miss? What should I try? Can this even be done?? I've done something SIMILAR before - taking a multi-boot o/s drive which was MBR with drive letter C: - and got that to boot BY ITSELF on another system by just using EasyBCD - easy-peasy! Then I converted it to GPT and it still booted up with no problems at all. Can EasyRE or any other utility that you produce or know of anywhere - help us to accomplish our goal? Thank you very much!
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