Using EasyBCD to fix external SSD

J

jbflavor

Member
EASYBCD to FIX EXTERNAL SSD

I have 2 laptops one of which recently got messed up because of the BCD error.
I first formatted the SSD and tried to reinstall Vista, thinking that doing that will fix the problem, but it failed to reboot during the installation process (which is one of the processes of installing vista). Therefore, I couldn't reinstall the vista.
So I tried Microsoft's 3 solutions to solving the BCD error, but none of them worked saying that there doesn't exist bcdeditor or whatever.

Can I take out my SSD equipped in the laptop, connect it to another laptop as an external SSD through USB port, and then use EasyBCD to fix the problem by installing EasyBCD on the laptop that doesn't have a problem? My laptop which I will use to fix the BCDerror is a pretty old one that runs Windows XP.

PLEASE HELP ME!! I AM A NOVICE USER.
THANKS A LOT!!
 
Last edited:
Hi JB, welcome to NST.
How did you try to reinstall Vista ? Were you using a recovery partition on the SSD, recovery media on optical disks, or a Vista DVD ?
If you were using optical media, do you have the BIOS set to boot CD/DVD before SSD ?
If you use a temporary override with F8 to boot from CD, instead of setting the BIOS default boot sequence, then the Install process will fail at the first reboot because the Setup program doesn't go back to the CD, but tries to boot from SSD before there's a system on it, capable of booting.
Just repairing the BCD isn't going to be enough if you've already reformatted the SSD. You've got to get the Vista Install finished.
 
Hello jbflavor,

Answer: Maybe

Connect up your other drive to the working computer. Open EasyBCD 2.0 beta, available here -> File -> Select BCD Store. You'll need to locate the other BCD store on the drive you've connected, located in \boot. Now if you need to perform operations such as recovering the Vista bootloader you should do that from a Vista DVD using the "Startup repair" feature on the broken laptop with hard drive connected. The instructions on using startup repair may be found here.
 
Thanks Terry and Justin for the replies.

I was using the Vista DVD and I set the BIOS to boot CD/DVD first before SSD. However, when I was reinstalling the Vista, it didn't even reboot, but instead, it said windows installation failed because it wasn't able to restart the computer. I have tried other solutions out there to fix it using cmd.exe, but all of them didn't work because one of the commands (bootsect.exe) was not recognized on my computer. I have 2 partitions on my SSD, and I just found that there was a hidden partiton labeled as "boot" which appears to be X drive, and wasn't able to format that X drive because the message popped up saying that it's write-protected.
Do you think this X drive thing has anything to do with the Vista installation failure?
What do I have to do?

Oh, one more thing I want to say is that there's no \boot drive, and instead there's x:\sources\boot, which doesn't have bootsect.exe file.

This is making me so frustrated...
 
Ok so you're re-installing Vista. Attach the broken drive to your working laptop and rescue any files that are important to you before reinstalling in the broken system. Boot from the Vista DVD -> Repair my computer -> Next -> Command Prompt. I'm assuming you've only got one hard drive in the laptop:

diskpart
select disk 0
clean
exit
Click to expand...

Now exit command prompt: "exit". Click the "X" button top right hand corner of the recovery options menu. This should take you back to the install Windows screen. Click "Install Now" to proceed with a clean Windows install.
 
Thank you so much Justin.
It finally works now, and I don't have to buy another HDD or SSD anymore. (I was actually thinking about getting one since no method worked so far.)
Have a great weekend and thanks again.
 
Back
Top