Is there a std procedure to follow for dual boot win10home when one disk fails?

O

oldchap

Member
Hello all,

Having spent most of the week trying to fix this by reading many forum entries I have to give up and ask a question.

I have a win10Home PC fully patched. Before I retired nearly 13yrs ago I used to regularly see businesses losing system availability. I therefore decided to clone my C: SSD to another identical SSD in the PC using EASEUS Partition Master and then some time in the past installed EasyBDC (currently 2.3) when on my ‘main’ C: drive to provide the menu. I regularly boot to my standby system using the handy Easybcd menu and run on that for the day to check all is well. So 2 good system disks.

Two weeks ago I closed down and removed the C: SSD to try it in a laptop. It was then that I noticed that I couldn’t boot from my standby disk, even having adjusted my Legacy BIOS in this 2011 PC. I was getting Error code 0x000000e which seems common on this forum. So my so called resilient system isn’t that good after all.

So to my question. If one creates the Easybcd menu on disk1 to be able to boot on either disk1 or disk2 and then disk1 fails , is there a standard procedure to be followed so that I can reboot on disk2 and keep my system running until such time as I can rebuild a replacement disk1?

Tried: winpe: Cant fix it it said. Also tried fixmbr cmds. No sign of fastboot. Tried other things I cant remember due to advancing years! Finally I put disk1 back in & confirmed I can dual boot as before. Thank you for any help
 
Reading between the lines, it seems you've been booting your main and backup systems as a dual-boot from the main system's BCD and you can't boot the backup with the main system removed ?
If that's an accurate summary, it's not surprising.
Even if your clone contains a BCD, it will be an exact copy of the original BCD at the time of cloning, which will point to the original system not the clone. ( the BCD identifies systems by a hashed UID which contains the unique disk signature. It doesn't use "letters" even though they appear (for your convenience) in EasyBCD translated from the hash via the system map in the registry.
You can either point EasyBCD to the clone's BCD (In tools > Select BCD) and delete the Windows entry and re-add it (that will retranslate the hash to the correct serial of the clone drive), or if you don't want to put the original SSD back you can repair the boot with your installation disc
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Thank you Terry for taking the time to reply. The good news is that yesterday I managed to fix the issue by cloning my main system disk (lets call it P1) to the second system disk (lets call it P2). My existing P1 easyboot menu has an entry for P1 and one for P2 so now my P2 disk should have the same. After setting my legacy BIOS to point to boot 1st option via P1, I then found that using the easybcd menu I could boot ok to P1, restart and then boot up on P2. As in the past that was fine.
Then I disconnected P1, altered the bios to point to P2 as 1st boot option , and found I could use second entry on P2's menu to load on P2. It loaded fine so my problem was fixed. Obviously when I then rebooted P2 & tried the P1 menu line it couldnt find the disk I had removed.
I dont understand what happened but as all is well I wont waste your valuable time further and thanks again.
 
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