Windows 7 forgotten how to boot.

wstanley

Member
Hi all, I have been running W7 for a few weeks and all has been well, but today I get 'disk boot failure'. Insert rescue disk, run startup repair, finds nothing wrong, so do a reboot with rescue CD still in drive. Don't touch keyboard at 'any key to boot from dvd' and it boots into W7 perfectly. Tried various bootrec option and such, but still will only boot with CD installed. So EasyBCD sounds like it might find the problem; but when I start it up I get 'boot configuration data store could not be opened' and invites me to manually load a BCD registry. Now I'm struggling : suggestions please.
 
Many thanks for the lightning reply.
I used step 3 of suggestion, but got 'element missing' message for /rebuildbcd option.
In desperation tried 'startup repair' again and it found a partition fault which it corrected. reboot failed again, but now if I bootup using repair cd in place I can run EasyBCD. So something has changed.
Tried Reset BCD Config and Re-create boot files, Still fails at boot.
In the 'startup repair' I'm told that the W7 is on drive E, but under W7 this drive appears as C; is this a problem?
When I run re-create boot files I don't get asked for boot or system location as indicated in the help. Is that OK?

Settings show one entry (Vista?) bootloader
Default Windows 7
Timeout 30 secs
Boot Drive d:\

Entry #1
name Windows7
BCD ID:{current}
Drive c:
Bootloader path : windows\system32\winload..exe

Where from here?


Many thanks
 
Simplified disk layout

I decided to simplify my hard disk layout, so I made the Win7 system disk the first drive to boot by changing the boot order in the bios. So now first physical drive = MBR/BCD/System/Win7 all on one drive.
Then with a bit of help from EasyBCD I got it all to boot.
Hooray!!
Many, many thanks to Mahmoud from his (prompt) guidance and a great app.
 
Question re above info

I have a problem with my computer - it is set up as a dual booting system via 2 partitions on a single hard drive:

Setup as follows:

C partition is WIndows XP

D partition is Windows 7

It has been working alright for the past few weeks until a couple of days ago, I think I installed something which has affected the boot process for Windows 7. I have the same problem as the guy above had when the computer goes through the start up repair for Windows 7 it seems to think that Win 7 is on drive E (that's the DVD drive). It has been driving me up the wall - anyway I came across this wesite and forums this morning and have been looking at solutions to this problem and came across this thread, my question is your advice about using EasyBCD "EasyBCD -> Manage Bootloader -> Reinstall Vista Bootloader", would this work in my case. I have installed EasyBCD on the WinXP partition of my hard drive.

I take it from what might have been said that Win7 is what Vista should have been?

Cheers in advance
 
Hi,

Try Diagnostics -> Reset BCD

Make sure you're using the very latest version of EasyBCD 2.0 (build 82 at the moment).
 
Make sure you use EasyBCD2 latest build. (1.7 pre-dates W7), and that XP has the pre-req NET2.0 framework installed, then you can "reinstall Vista/7 bootloader" from XP
Don't worry what the booted recovery disk calls W7, all running OSs have their own idea of lettering (Letters don't exist in the real world, just in the virtual world of an OS's mind (they're just registry entries)). Just select W7 and " startup repair"
If you're saying that W7 has accidentally changed identity (it's calling itself a different letter), you can fix that with this registry hack.
If it's a genuine boot process failure, read these.
http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+with+EasyBCD
http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+from+the+DVD
 
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