EasyBCD is a powerful tool that will let you also edit the BCD menus on different disks. This comes in useful in different scenarios, such as
- Editing the menu on a bootable USB stick
- Fixing the boot menu on a hard disk taken from a different PC (repairing virus damage, etc)
- Viewing the contents of an EasyBCD backup
Editing an external BCD is simple. Just run EasyBCD and choose the “Select BCD Store” entry from the “File” menu:
EasyBCD select BCD store screen
The BCD store is typically located at the \BOOT\BCD location on the boot partition. This partition may be hidden if it was automatically created during Windows 7 installation.
If that’s the case, you’ll need to first manually assign it a drive letter from Computer Management | Disk Management (Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Computer Management | Disk Management) before being able to open it in EasyBCD. Also make sure that you have the viewing of both hidden and operating system files enabled, or else you’ll be unable to browse to the BCD path in EasyBCD’s open file dialog (though you may still enter the path manually if you already know it).
EasyBCD will then load the BCD and update all pages to show the contents of the manually-selected BCD instead of the system BCD menu. All future operations in EasyBCD will update the manually-loaded BCD store, and not the system boot menu. To go back to editing the local system menu, just choose “Load System BCD” from the “File” menu once more.