Recovering bootloader from DVD on the Wiki

J

JonF

Member
A few times I've had occasion to use the nuclear technique listed at Recovering the Vista or Windows 7 Bootloader from the DVD. I have a couple of comments but I don't want to edit the wiki myself because I'm a newbie here. So here goes.

I think that "bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force" should be replaced with "bootsect.exe /nt60 c: /force" and maybe even "bootsect.exe /nt60 c: /force /mbr" (and remove "bootrec.exe /fixmbr"). If you happen to have booted from a flash drive using Grub4DOS to load an ISO, as I have, the original version kills the Grub4DOS bootloader on the USB drive and makes that drive unbootable until Grub4DOS is reinstalled. I don't know if the Vista version of bootsect includes the /mbr switch, but the Windows 7 version definitely does: Bootsect Command-Line Options.

A very minor issue, but sometimes I've gotten myself into a situation where the BCD file has RHSA attributes, so changing "attrib -h -s C:\boot\BCD" to "attrib -h -s -r C:\boot\BCD" certainly doesn't hurt an occasionally helps.
 
Hi Jon,

The /mbr flag is new to the Windows 7 version of bootsect. On Windows Vista, you need to use bootsect to do the bootsector and bootrec to do the MBR.
The problem with using C: is that it's not always C:. Windows will just assign the C: label to the first partition on the first drive - which may very well not be the boot drive. Perhaps a warning with a link to this thread would do trick?

The attributes comment is of course spot on. We do have a few attrib commands on that page, but I don't think they're consistently there. I'll make sure to correct that.
 
Well, the page has a lot of commands that include "C:\Boot\..." and it already has a disclaimer about what to do if the boot drive's not C (albeit below the "bootsect" command), so I don't see it as a big deal to add one more "C:" and move the disclaimer.
 
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