Laptop is now toast?

A

argy

Member
Hi,

I installed bcd on my vista laptop having previously created a centos partition running trixbox pbx which I couldn't subsequently boot in to. I installed bcd to allow me to boot into this partition.

With bcd I backed up my boot records (to the root of my c drive) and I can see this as a 20 byte file. I then added the new centos entry to the list and saved. When I rebooted I didn't get any options, I saw a black screen flash which I presume had the boot options but as the delay was set to the default 0 seconds I could not do anything with this.

In Vista I ran bcd again and told it to boot into the centos partition and restarted. That's when I lost my laptop...

The laptop now only boots into the acer recovery screen and none of the startup fixes solves the issue despite multiple iterations. I have a vista recovery dvd from neosmart and have run all flavours of bootrec. The result I get is that bootrec can not find any installations.

Anything I can do (other than a new install) to get my laptop, and preferably all my data, back?

Thanks in anticipation
Argy
 
A

argy

Member
Well, seeing as the laptop boots into its recovery mode and since I wrote that I can see backup that I placed on the root of the C drive I can't see that that the hard drive has worked loose.

Thanks for your input.

Argy
 
A

argy

Member
Sorted

Hi,

Yes, I tried all the approaches on the site.

I solved the problem by making a backup image of the hard drive (put the drive into another PC and ran Macrium Reflect free edition). I then re-installed (recovered) the saved image back onto the laptop hard drive and told the application (Reflect) to replace the MBR with the standard XP MBR.

I did this with some reservation as my laptop is vista.

After the above I put the hard drive back into the laptop which wouldn't reboot so I then had to go through the install from dvd process and get the computer to repair itself. The laptop recognised an issue with the boot record and resolved the issue. I had to make one more reboot and now the system is working fine.

I don't think I'll be bothering with easybcd.

I will be sticking with Macrium Reflect and will definitely save an image before doing anything with the mbr in the future.

Regards
 
Terry60

Terry60

Telephone Sanitizer (2nd Class)
Staff member
What version of EasyBCD were you using ?
Why were you rewriting the MBR anyway ? That's not necessary to add entries into the MS BCD.
Why on earth did you have timeout set to zero ?
How did you expect to see a boot menu ?
Don't blame EasyBCD for borking your system.
There are (literally) millions of users of this app, which would hardy be the case if it broke systems.
A simple socket set can be successfully used to wreck a fine motor car. It's not responsible for the damage.
 
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