Latest Windows 10 boot images ONLY want to boot from boot.wim

steje

Active Member
Hi there! Been awhile since I've had need to post here. First, thanks so much for such a great and useful utility...!




The confusing things I've bumped into along the way - are when I've got systems with maybe a little odd MBR/GPT drives and different BIOS settings (Legacy, UEFI or Legacy + UEFI). I was hoping that with a brand new PC I've built for my son - with modern hardware - that I'd have a bit better luck with things. But I've bumped into a stumper...

I've recently settled on using RUFUS to make bootable USB's from several different ISO's - which works fine. For simplicity - let's limit the conversation to a Windows 10 bootable USB Flash drive created from the ISO downloaded by the most current Windows Media Creation Tool (Windows 10 Build 1909). The USB boots fine, and lets me install Windows 10 with ease. The PC (an MPG X570 GAMING PRO CARBON WIFI mobo with an AMD Ryzen 7 2700 cpu) is configured for UEFI Only.

However, while I can use EasyBCD (latest version 2.4 - download just a few days ago) to modify the boot menu and add the various additional boot images (all bootable WIM files), the computer refuses to boot from any image OTHER than boot.wim. In fact, I normally rename my images to something other than boot .wim (boot_tools, boot_win10_setup, boot_aomei_56, etc etc)... and when I tried to boot with no plain old boot.wim file present - I get the black and white text error on boot that no boot device was found. It took me awhile to figure out the problem was in fact that it ONLY wanted to boot into boot.wim - and was ignoring all entries in the BCD store that I added with EasyBCD.

I'm aware that there are various limitations in UEFI Only mode - appreciate the note on the documentation page to that effect - but EasyBCD "lets" me add all of the WIM's to the boot menu - and ALL of them boot as expected when I rename them to boot.wim. So - to get by - I've resorted to renaming whichever toolset I want to boot into (you know it's coming...) boot.wim. And all works as expected.

So - does anybody know what's going on?

In the past - I've been able to have full command of the boot menu... though I believe those have ALL been bootable USB drives I've MADE bootable with EasyBCD itself - using the options on the BCD Deployment page in the tool, which are all just Legacy BIOS/MBR boot drives. But wanting to step into the 2020's now - I'm looking to keep things "new" and use UEFI and GPT partitions exclusively.

Also - this issue seems specific to the latest bootable flash drives based on Windows 10 (i.e. I have the same problem with other bootable ISO image based boot drives). And what's also kind of strange is that I can modify the BCD on the local disk inside the new PC itself (a 1TB Samsung SSD drive) and everything works with all of the same WIM files I'm using the bootable USB flash drives.

Any thoughts from anyone?
 
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