I'm fairly familiar with the Windows booting process and the role of boot.ini. I installed EasyBCD to evaluate its possible use and then uninstalled it. However, I've since been plagued by a rogue EasyBCD choice menu at startup and cannot get rid of it. What other files need to be removed so that Windows only uses native boot processes and files?
Incomplete EasyBCD Uninstall
- Thread starter Andy D
- Start date
EasyBCD does not have a start menu. It's not a boot manager.
It merely manages the contents of the MS BCD (Vista onwards functional replacement of boot.ini) and has no application in an XP-only environment.
Can you post a screenshot of what you're seeing.
It merely manages the contents of the MS BCD (Vista onwards functional replacement of boot.ini) and has no application in an XP-only environment.
Can you post a screenshot of what you're seeing.
Thank you for your helpful advice. Although I am very familiar with the Windows XP boot process, I now realise that I didn't understand Windows !0 which is different! Can I boot Windows 10 from an entry in boot.ini in Windows XP, or do I always have to boot Windows 10 from a Windows BCD entry? I can boot Windows XP from a Windows 10 BCD entry.
You can't boot anything later than XP from boot.ini.
In fact you can't boot any newer windows from any older.
There's complete backward compatibility, e.g. W10 can boot W8.1/8/7/Vista/XP, but each generation of bootmgr only knows the digital signatures of earlier winload.exe generations (how can it know future dig-sigs ?), so dual-booting W8/10 cannot be done from W8, only W10.
In fact you can't boot any newer windows from any older.
There's complete backward compatibility, e.g. W10 can boot W8.1/8/7/Vista/XP, but each generation of bootmgr only knows the digital signatures of earlier winload.exe generations (how can it know future dig-sigs ?), so dual-booting W8/10 cannot be done from W8, only W10.