grabankles
Member
I haven't used BCD - yet to try to repair a BCD store or MBR, because the few problems I've had, windows wouldn't boot at all. Simple clone or BU restore operations w/ True Image or Ghost, messed up the BCD / MBR so badly, wouldn't boot.
Guess my question is, when you DON'T have a booting ver of Windows, (besides Vista Recovery Disk - that does NOT always work), what are suggestions of free? bootable BCD / MBR editors? BootIt Bare Metal (former "NG") is useful, but kinda pricey after 30 day trial. It's VERY rare I need these sorts of prgms.
Most recent, I simply made BU of the APPLICATIONS partition (D
from an old disk (no longer booting disk - w/ Vista), & restored it to new disk.
NOTHING else was included in the BU image - JUST D: off old disk. The "new" disk has been running / booting w/ Vista just fine for couple wks.
AFAIK, there's nothing in that BU / restore operation that should touch the OS, BCD, MBR, Boot Manager - but it DID. It (Ghost 15) restore of D: to it's own partition on NEW disk worked (the partition already existed), but ALSO completely messed up BCD & Boot Mgr. Had to use trial boot disk of BootIt bare metal, to straighten it out.
EasyBCD has it's place & use, but need a bootable OS on same machine to use it. A few times I used Vista Recovery / repair console, it made corrections all right, but they were WAY messed up.
Thanks.
Guess my question is, when you DON'T have a booting ver of Windows, (besides Vista Recovery Disk - that does NOT always work), what are suggestions of free? bootable BCD / MBR editors? BootIt Bare Metal (former "NG") is useful, but kinda pricey after 30 day trial. It's VERY rare I need these sorts of prgms.
Most recent, I simply made BU of the APPLICATIONS partition (D
from an old disk (no longer booting disk - w/ Vista), & restored it to new disk.NOTHING else was included in the BU image - JUST D: off old disk. The "new" disk has been running / booting w/ Vista just fine for couple wks.
AFAIK, there's nothing in that BU / restore operation that should touch the OS, BCD, MBR, Boot Manager - but it DID. It (Ghost 15) restore of D: to it's own partition on NEW disk worked (the partition already existed), but ALSO completely messed up BCD & Boot Mgr. Had to use trial boot disk of BootIt bare metal, to straighten it out.
EasyBCD has it's place & use, but need a bootable OS on same machine to use it. A few times I used Vista Recovery / repair console, it made corrections all right, but they were WAY messed up.
Thanks.
