How to fix a Win 7 UEFI "ghost"?

WillyK

WillyK

Member
After recovering my Win 7 UEFI installation (long story...), I ended up with a GPT system disk with 2 partitions (EFI and System). Windows is booting persistently Ok and everything seems to be working just fine, but ...
1. No OS can be detected by Windows or EasyBCD or ... any tool, including Windows DVD / System Repair
2. Consequently, no OS is listed in the MSCONFIG -> BOOT Tab and nothing there is "clickable" (dead tab)
3. Checks like SFC /SCANNOW, CHKDSK, etc. etc. do not report any kind of errors - Everything's Ok!

Now, since the PC is working, maybe I shouldn't worry too much about all this, but it's obviously not normal to have such a "ghost" of an OS that even Windows itself cannot detect, and I'd like to fix that without having to go thru a complete clean reinstall (I have so many programs and settings that would have taken weeks to reinstall).

Any suggestions? How can I use EasyBCD to fix my UEFI configuration on a GTP disk making Windows (and others) see the light again? Basically, I just can't figure out what's wrong with the current setup (I've tried hard!)

Please advise. Thank you!
_____________________________
PS: I've already donated ... :smile:

bcd1.jpg bcd2.jpg
 
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Btw I crosschecked the basic registry Boot settings against several other computers (some W7, and some W10) and this PC is lacking the HKLM / BCD00000000 hive! I'm not sure what I can do about it, and it's insane that this machine is booting and working at all while missing this fundamental part of the registry... Any ideas?
 
WillyK said:
Btw I crosschecked the basic registry Boot settings against several other computers (some W7, and some W10) and this PC is lacking the HKLM / BCD00000000 hive! I'm not sure what I can do about it, and it's insane that this machine is booting and working at all while missing this fundamental part of the registry... Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Here's a snapshot showing that:
bcd-problem.jpg

As I mentioned in the beginning, all checks like SFC /SCANNOW, CHKDSK, etc. etc. do not report any kind of errors - Everything seems to be Ok!
 
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Interesting ... I booted from the Windows DVD and executed a Startup Repair even though no OS was found.
It finished saying that there was no OS entry listed in the partition table... I'm not sure if it repaired anything at all though.

The interesting part is that the System disk C: now suddenly is shown as Disk 0 in Disk management!! (it used to be Disk 1 before, see the screenshot above). Of course, I haven't moved any disks around but the System disk has always been the first disk in BIOS (P1), so how Windows managed to change its order of disks is a mystery to me...

DM1.jpg
 
I ran the Startup Repair from the Win DVD a few more times and got exactly the same result, even though it says that the repair was successful every single time... (only the "time taken" number differs, naturally). What the h... is wrong with this system? And why is Windows loading and running if there's no valid System Partition there? Beats me

SR.jpg
 
Apparently, the native Windows DVD (repair utilities) don't work well with a UEFI setup on GPT drive, so... no use for that.

I know that everybody is quite busy nowadays, but I was hoping that it wouldn't require a lot of effort to provide some quick BCD advice in this forum... Anybody?
 
The problem looks like it is in your BIOS boot priority sequence.
EasyBCD assumes that the BCD is in Disk 0.
If it's not you can tell it so when it asks you (your first attachment in post #1)
(just keep drilling down in the dialogue window to C:\boot\BCD)
Or you can change your BIOS so that it stops searching a non-system disk before finding the boot files on a later drive.

I see from your later posts that the boot order apparently changed without your intervention.
That could be a quirk of disk management (bug)
Do you have any really old IDE connected HDDs ?
They confuse the h*ll out of Disk management.

Also, on a UEFI BIOS, you don't specify the partition in the old legacy BIOS way, but point it at "Windows boot manager" or some such wording (It's been a few years since I installed W7/W8 in a GPT UEFI SSD dual-boot, so this is all from deep memory, not recent experience.)
 
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Terry60 said:
The problem looks like it is in your BIOS boot priority sequence.
EasyBCD assumes that the BCD is in Disk 0.
If it's not you can tell it so when it asks you (your first attachment in post #1)
(just keep drilling down in the dialogue window to C:\boot\BCD)
Or you can change your BIOS so that it stops searching a non-system disk before finding the boot files on a later drive.

I see from your later posts that the boot order apparently changed without your intervention.
That could be a quirk of disk management (bug)
Do you have any really old IDE connected HDDs ?
They confuse the h*ll out of Disk management.

Also, on a UEFI BIOS, you don't specify the partition in the old legacy BIOS way, but point it at "Windows boot manager" or some such wording (It's been a few years since I installed W7/W8 in a GPT UEFI SSD dual-boot, so this is all from deep memory, not recent experience.)
Click to expand...

Thanks Terry! It is a UEFI BIOS and yes, WIndows Boot Manager is in charge. No IDE drives or other old stuff. The system is generally booting up and working, and I cannot detect any system errors other than completely undetectable Default OS (or any OS for that matter), and no BCD00000000 entry in the registry.

I assigned a letter to the hidden EFI partition (100MB FAT32) and managed to load the BCD hive (i.e. \\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD) manually into the registry, as a HKLM key BCD00000000. I even made an export of the loaded BCD00000000 key and it looks good! HOWEVER, on the next reboot Windows deletes this key and everything is back to "abnormal"... If I then try to MERGE the BCD00000000 into the registry from the exported .REG file... Windows won't let me! (Administrator or not, doesn't matter).

Now, I have no clue why this is happening. I've checked all paths and other environment variables, performed every thinkable system check/test and there are no errors reported. Apparently Windows knows where the OS is, boots up and works Ok, but it cannot detect any OS installed in MSCONFIG or System Advanced Settings etc. How come?

I recently got a Genuine Advantage validation error (Event Viewer) probably because of this problem. Running the MS GA validation diagnostics confirmed that my installation is genuine, but normal (online) validation just reports that it cannot determine if my WIndows is genuine... And this is only one example of potential complications because of this weird problem, even though Windows seems to be working otherwise.

Running BCDedit /enum reports that it cannot open the boot configuration data store, and ... that "The requested system device cannot be found." THIS IS IT! I've seen this several times before, and if I try to work with BCDedit pointing to the store on the EFI partition, it always fails to perform complaining about "The requested system device cannot be found." WHAT DEVICE IS THAT? I mean, both partitions EFI (System) and C: (Boot) are identified, available and accessible. I really don't understand the BCDedit problem.

What do you make out of that?
 
That is not a UEFI GPT system, it would look like thisEFI.JPG
with the boot partition labelled EFI, and additional (non-optional) recovery partitions, all of indeterminate file-system.
You must be running in BIOS emulation mode with MBR disk format.
In which case you should have an "active" flag on the "system" partition (doesn't exist in GPT), which I can't see anywhere.
Try switching the active flag on, on your FAT partition using Disk Management.
 
Terry60 said:
That is not a UEFI GPT system, it would look like thisView attachment 3271
with the boot partition labelled EFI, and additional (non-optional) recovery partitions, all of indeterminate file-system.
You must be running in BIOS emulation mode with MBR disk format.
In which case you should have an "active" flag on the "system" partition (doesn't exist in GPT), which I can't see anywhere.
Try switching the active flag on, on your FAT partition using Disk Management.
Click to expand...

I wish you were right, Terry, but the disk is GPT and not MBR and an EFI Windows Boot Manager is running the show... Just have a look here:

bcd10.jpg bcd11.jpgbcd12.jpg

You have a point that the System (H) partition is not called "EFI System" but only "System" and I've also noticed that no recovery partitions exist on the disk, even though it's GPT, but I never thought that this may be related to the problem. I'm not really sure why that is (maybe Windows 7 uses different GPT format from Win8/Win10?).

So what do you think?
 
We seem to have reached the same point.
Something is screwed (luckily not fatally) but I'm at as much of a loss as yourself as to what it is.
I'd assume that your OP opening "..recovering..." was not " ..fully..."
You'd have a better stab at determining what, knowing what the original problem was, and the remedial action you took.
I'll refer this thread to the boss.
If he doesn't know, you're not likely to find the answer here.
 
Terry60 said:
We seem to have reached the same point.
Something is screwed (luckily not fatally) but I'm at as much of a loss as yourself as to what it is.
I'd assume that your OP opening "..recovering..." was not " ..fully..."
You'd have a better stab at determining what, knowing what the original problem was, and the remedial action you took.
I'll refer this thread to the boss.
If he doesn't know, you're not likely to find the answer here.
Click to expand...

Much appreciated! The original problem started with a sudden WIndows load failure: "System found unauthorized change of firmware, operation system, or UEFI drivers." Nothing was recently installed or modified... It just popped up out of the blue. Disabling Secure Boot in BIOS (deleting PK) seemingly did the trick (Asus Support claimed that I shouldn't even have a Secure Boot for a Windows 7 system at all...). Well, I never activated this manually, so I assume it arrived with an Asus BIOS update. However, I was worried about potential OS corruption (possibly virus), so I did what I could to cleanup the system etc. However, it was refreshing the BIOS that probably fixed the problem radically, because after that I had all secure keys loaded again and the secure boot working as before... including Windows loading as before. BUT I guess something must have happened during this process so I lost my OS detection (the current issue). Unfortunately, I didn't discover that right away. So ... here we go.

SInce yesterday, I renamed the BCD to BCD.bak and reconstructed the BCD by using: bcdboot c:\windows /l en-us /s h: /f ALL even though the old BCD was working fine for its purpose. I was hoping that maybe the system somehow would repair itself or at least report potential problems giving me some clue what could be wrong.

Nothing went wrong! The new BCD was created, the system booted up fine, and ... still no OS shows up in MSCONFIG etc. just as before. So the BCD itself is probably not the problem. It seems that Windows cannot find information about current system configuration and what OS is installed. I don't know where MSCONFIG is looking for that.

What I don't get is why the HKLM/BCD00000000 key is missing in registry, and why Windows wouldn't let me to insert (merge) a valid BCD00000000.reg script into registry! Loading the BCD hive manually works just fine, but of course it's gone on the next reboot. I even tried to trick WIndows by exporting the entire Registry with BCD00000000 loaded, and restore it after yet another reboot. It still wouldn't import the BCD00000000 key! Of course, I'm not sure if importing this key will solve the problem, but at least it would make the registry complete (all my other machines have distinct BCD00000000 keys in registry, and they run both W7 and W10 OS so this key should be there).

Whatever the cause, I'd imagine that EasyBCD should be able to address such issues where the BCD information is missing in registry. Don't you think? Searching for answers on the web I've seen a number of people struggling with similar problems, so I guess the demand is there. I hope you'll find this interesting enough to share your thinking and suggest possible causes to investigate further. I'm not an expert on Windows sysinternals and BCD / UEFI matters, so I really need all the help I can get. Thank you!
 
Btw, I figured out the BCDEDIT problem: "The requested system device cannot be found." It simply can't find where the BCD is!
If I point it explicitly to where the BCD resides, then it works like a charm (see the screenshot below). Maybe this is (part of) the problem, i.e. that certain system utilities can't find the BCD? And of course, the big questions is... Why is that? Is it some parameter missing or holding the wrong value? I don't know where to look or what to check. Any clues?

bcd13.jpg

I believe that resolving this problem would contribute valuable knowledge to this forum and the EasyBCD users. It would be potentially useful to many people, and I'm confident that we can nail it if we just join forces and don't give up :smile:
 
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My suspicion is that it's all linked to that GPT anomaly.
Something in the configuration of that HDD is confusing utilities running within Windows so that they are unable to find the BCD using the normal way-points which usually direct them.
Luckily the UEFI BIOS itself still makes its way there and the system boots.
The fact that EasyBCD, bcdedit and Disk Management all have problems correctly finding/describing that drive makes me think it is corrupted in some way
I have W7 on an ASUS mobo too, but have not seen your problem after any WUD, though I think I disabled secure boot (It was a long time ago, so not certain either way)
(the bootmgr is W8.1 since upgraded to W10 in a dual-boot with my default W7 OS of choice)
 
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Terry60 said:
My suspicion is that it's all linked to that GPT anomaly.
Something in the configuration of that HDD is confusing utilities running within Windows so that they are unable to find the BCD using the normal way-points which usually direct them.
Luckily the UEFI BIOS itself still makes its way there and the system boots.
The fact that EasyBCD, bcdedit and Disk Management all have problems correctly finding/describing that drive makes me think it is corrupted in some way
I have W7 on an ASUS mobo too, but have not seen your problem after any WUD, though I think I disabled secure boot (It was a long time ago, so not certain either way)
(the bootmgr is W8.1 since upgraded to W10 in a dual-boot with my default W7 OS of choice)
Click to expand...

Thanks Terry! What are you saying makes a lot of sense to me. I've been also wondering about the GPT setup of this drive, and that the MSR partition is not showing up in Disk Management (and of course, the lack of recovery partition too, but none of my GPT drives have recovery partitions so I assumed that it has something to do with W7).

I'd love to reformat the drive so Windows can read it (and if this is not the problem at least to eliminate this suspicion). I just don't know how to do that.
What I've tried so far is to take a full disk backup, erase the drive (unallocated), and restore the backup, but it obviously didn't work. I also tried a clean Windows installation (basic) from the original DVD, then restoring the backup to the disk configured by the clean installation (that is how I ended up with a hidden MSR btw). This didn't work too. Or maybe it even worsen the problem?

I therefore wonder if the OS has a problem with working towards this drive and maybe not the drive itself?

Can you think of something else that I can try, either reformatting the drive or making the OS work with it, or anything else?
I'd greatly appreciate any suggestions and I'd be happy to try those out! Thanks!
 
The type of the EFI partition should be c12a7328-f81f-11d2-ba4b-00a0c93ec93b. If it is not, and in particular if it is ebd0a0a2-b9e5-4433-87c0-68b6b72699c7 then this could be the cause of the problem.

If the partition type is not as above, change it using the 'set id' command,

Using diskpart with the correct drive and partition selected use "set id=c12a7328-f81f-11d2-ba4b-00a0c93ec93b"

bcdedit /enum should then work.
 
I recently got a Genuine Advantage validation error (Event Viewer) probably because of this problem. Running the MS GA validation diagnostics confirmed that my installation is genuine, but normal (online) validation just reports that it cannot determine if my WIndows is genuine... And this is only one example of potential complications because of this weird problem, even though Windows seems to be working otherwise.
 
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