[Solved] Now I'm In a Boot Pickle

Ex_Brit

Moderator
Staff member
I had to Format and reinstall my main C: drive (Vista) which carries my main boot files, EasyBCD etc. etc. and although I have all my OS's listed back in EasyBCD and iReboot setup, I can only boot between my 2 Vista's, C: and D:. My Windows 7's on L: and M: and my Windows 8 on N: are all inaccessible.
I tried restoring EasyBCD from a backup, didn't help so far.
I get a black screen with a long error saying some hardware changes have been made and Windows is protecting me or some such nonsense. Something about winload and driver enforcement, I've told EasyBCD to ignore driver signing to no avail.
I'm sure I've asked this before but my memory is getting shorter with age I'm afraid...is there a quick remedy?
Pending your response I'm continuing to try various things here.
Do I need to boot from the Win 7 disc and repair startup? If so how and if I recall that has to be done a few times, no?
Thanks guys.

Addendum

OK, I managed to find the identical problem I had back in 2010 and ran Win 7 Startup Repair on the first Win 7 partition and now have access to both. But Win 8 remains elusive and will have to try to find the DVD I burned for that to do the same thing, which no doubt will force that awful Win 8 bootloader on me but I should be able to alter that within that system.

Addendum

OK, episode 3.....
Did the same with the Windows 8 DVD and while that menu is slightly different it repaired it in seconds and even gave me my old EasyBCD boot menu back without any quibble.
Have made darn sure that I made a backup of the settings and have erased all previous ones.

By the way this all started when I did a repair install of Vista on C: and whilst it succeeded in solving one problem (some clash between iTunes and optical drive filters and/or other software making the drives disappear periodically) it introduced another unknown one and in my efforts to troubleshoot that I started BSOD-ing so at that point threw in the towel and surrendered to my fate.

Moved this to Windows Support so that others may benefit.
 
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