Win 8 Boot – Destroyed in seconds (Solved)

And recovered again, but not without some initial grief.
Here’s some tips for all you folks who like me wished they’d read the instructions properly before they added Win8 to their existing EasyBDC Boot Menu... (Applies to Win8 installed to a separate hard drive)

First mistake not to make: Save a bit of time and add the Win8 entry while booted into Win7
Doesn’t work – it’s all to do with forward/backward OS compatibility
++Change your bios to boot to the Win8 drive, install and configure EasyBCD there.

Second mistake not to make: Go back to Win7 and delete (all experts roll your eyes now) what you thought was the ‘bad’ Win8 entry…
Bad move. What you will actually be doing is removing the ‘real’ entry and ability of Win8 to boot itself even if it is on the only drive on the system!

Third mistake not to make – think that you can boot from the Win8 install CD, select the ‘Recovery’ option and have windows reset your bcd.
Silly you. As far as Win8 recovery is concerned the BCD is fine – it can see your other Win entries and there is nothing to do…

You can spend the next hour skim reading pages documentation and Googling or you can:
++Create a Win7 recovery disk and boot from that – it will recover and reset the Win8 BCD just fine.

Finally go back to Win8, set up EasyBCD again and turn off the Fast Boot option (Control panel – Power Options – System settings) so that you get consistent boot behaviour when powering up and restarting.

Cheers!
 
Hi "justan"

Thanks for sharing your info. I'm working on a fix for the forward compatibility problem. I'm sure other Windows 8 dual-booters will find your post most helpful.
 
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