Updates for EasyBCD

jharris1993

Member
Ref: Blog entries at http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=6389

I am going to propose some changes in the 2.0.2 EasyBCD.

BUG: When you select BCD Backup/Repair --> Change Boot Drive, the drive shown is always the "C:" drive even if that is not the current location for the system store. This can be hugely confusing - even if the user has been around the block once or twice. (Go ahead, I DARE you, ask me how I figured that one out?!)

My system has two drives installed, a 120 gig drive that has 2k8Standard on it, partitioned into one 100 meg "System Reserved" partition and the rest of the drive as the "C" drive. The BCD is located on the reserved partition.

I added an 80 gig drive - and partitioned as two 40 gig partitions.

I installed 2k8Enterprise on the first 40 gig partition. EasyBCD shows this as drive "E".

The actual BCD is located on the reserved partition which was eventually labeled as "G"

If I select "change boot drive" - it always shows "C" - regardless of where the actual boot store is located. The result of this is that the user can inadvertently install multiple BCD's on the system.

Expected behavior: The initial value shown in "change boot drive" should be the actual current location of the BCD.

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Enhancement Request:
Can EasyBCD display - perhaps in the title bar - the location of the current BCD store being used? This would be especially useful if there are multiple BCD stores.

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Nice-to-have: (It'd be damned handy)

When viewing the "detailed (Debug)" BCD listing, can this be made editable somehow?

Today, (God Himself Only Knows How), I ended up with a duplicated entry in the "display order" section of the BCD. I tried removing - and recreating it - but then I had a different GUID for that entry and the "resumeobject" set to a GUID that has now been orphaned. In order to fix this, I had to jump through major hoops using BCDedit.

All of this would have been avoided if I could have simply gone in and "cut" the offending duplicate entry out.

What say ye?

Jim
 
Hi Jim,

WRT the Change Boot Drive issue - EasyBCD 2.1 has a number of improvements to the usability and behavior of EBCD when it comes to dealing with external BCD stores.

But I don't understand why you'd want to change the boot drive to the current already boot drive? In fact, if you try it, there's a good chance that you'll get an error about the BCD being in use (well, if you try to do that for the system BCD and not a removable disk at any rate).

Actually, this makes me want to implement sort of an opposite feature - an asterisk after the letter of the current boot drive, and a message box telling you that you can't change the boot drive to be the same as the current boot drive.

If it weren't for the super-rare cases where one would need it, I would even consider disabling Change Boot Drive when an external BCD is selected. The only case it'll be handy is when the device that the external BCD is on has multiple partitions and you want a different partition on the same removable media to become the new boot partition.


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WRT the title bar thing - that's something I'd had in mind for quite a while. However, I realized given that EasyBCD is not a full-screen application, there's only such a tiny bit of text that would fit in the title bar. What I ended up doing is adding to the main screen (overview display) a line "Path: xxx" near the very top (see screenshot below).

55ae21ea934cf2c25b55bba84eeacaf6475c454f86.png


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As for the last issue - it'd be impossible to do that, since there would be no way to specify what the user can or cannot change. However, I'm interested in how you got resumeobject to break (and how you fixed it) - ideally EasyBCD should automate that entire process invisibly so you wouldn't have to touch bcdedit in the first place.
 
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