hard drive - How to disable or choose the 'correct' windows boot manager?

26
2014-06

LIUFA

I have recently changed motherboard CPU and Ram, my PC was growing for around a decade and it's a bit of a mess. I have 4 Hard drives 1 SSD and 3 HDD all full of valuable data (not photos). Before changing motherboard I had 3 operating systems installed (2 x Win 7, 1 x XP). Windows boot manager was on HDD while Windows 7 installation that I was using was on SSD. When I changed hardware it failed to boot the system with blue screen of death and since I have changed 3 components it was real possibility of hardware failure. So to test I disconnected all HDDs and re-installed windows 7 on SSD (full format with partition deletion). After install I did hardware test it's all ok - so it was windows failing. I managed to connect 2 of HDDs back ok, but the one that had windows boot manager is now ruining my day. It offers me to Recover windows or Start normally choosing ether option results in couple of lines with Windows loading files and I end up in same screen of choosing same options. Even if I disable that HDD in BIOS as possible boot drive it still results in same. If I physically disconnect that HDD, SSD takes over and windows load up fine.
New motherboard is Asus Rampage IV Extreme, SSD drive is formatted as GPD. Is there a way to set the hard drive configuration in such a way that HDD with boot manager would get ignored, or I would get an option of choosing which boot manager to use, or any other option to solve this that does not involve formatting HDD as I just cant afford to lose the data on that HDD. If you need additional info I will do my best just ask.

Answers

hbforce

Your problem is obvious, putting the old drive on a new motherboard will most likely fail during boot since the motherboard drivers installed in windows will be for the wrong board, so what i suggest to do is to take your old HDD plugin it into a RAK attach it on the new motherboard via USB (it means you must boot with your new SSD) and copy your interesting files into another hard drive, then format this old HDD with the new motherboard, now you can attach your old HDD into your new motherboard and install a fresh version of Windows, and now you will have the boot menu to choose between different OS.

+1 if it helped, thank you.

MetaNova

You seem fairly confident in modifying BIOS settings, so if you haven't yet, try changing the boot order there. Make sure the bad drive is at the way bottom of the list.

Also, if, say the bad drive is using UEFI and the other is using MBR, many computers will prioritize UEFI over MBR so you may want to look into that also. When that is the case, there will often be more than one boot order list.

Worst case scenario is that you have to boot up a live Linux system to copy the files from the one drive to the other and format it from there.

Related Question

windows 7 - Remove XP from XP/W7 dual boot (move boot manager)

windows-7 boot boot-manager

J F

Given this BCDEDIT table:

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
device                  partition=Y:
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {current}
resumeobject            {3e25c382-bae5-11de-a75b-e7fc07f62dc4}
displayorder            {ntldr}
                        {current}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 0

Windows Legacy OS Loader
------------------------
identifier              {ntldr}
device                  partition=Y:
path                    \ntldr
description             Earlier Version of Windows

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {current}
device                  partition=C:
path                    \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description             Windows 7
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence        {3e25c384-bae5-11de-a75b-e7fc07f62dc4}
recoveryenabled         Yes
osdevice                partition=C:
systemroot              \Windows
resumeobject            {3e25c382-bae5-11de-a75b-e7fc07f62dc4}
nx                      OptIn

What should I do to remove the XP installation on Y: and completely remove that partition's dependency on booting, move the boot manager to C: and mark C: active (System) so I can boot from it?

The "guides" I've found are a bit contradictory and some use bcdedit, some use bcdboot and some a manual thing with bootrec /fixmbr + bootrec /fixboot triage.

I am going to answer this myself somewhat.

I ended up doing this:

• copied Y:\Boot\* to C:\Boot. Some files could not be copied. I expected this, and the next step should take care of it.

• exported system store

bcdedit /export C:\Boot\BCD

• changed Windows Boot Manager location

bcdedit /store C:\Boot\BCD /set {9dea862c-5cdd-4e70-acc1-f32b344d4795} device partition=C:

• changed Windows Memory Tester location

bcdedit /store C:\Boot\BCD /set {b2721d73-1db4-4c62-bf78-c548a880142d} device partition=C:

• changed Windows Legacy OS Loader location

bcdedit /store C:\Boot\BCD /set {466f5a88-0af2-4f76-9038-095b170dc21c} device partition=C:

• updated master boot code

Windows_7_DVD:\BOOT\BOOTSECT /NT60 C: /FORCE

• changed the active partition

DISKPART
  select disk 0
  select partition 1
  active

However, it didn't work anyway. I had to do a repair because "BOOTMGR is missing". I believe I should have also copied bootmgr from Y: to C:, but I'm not sure if that was all I missed.

I'm still curious if this is a really bass-ackwards way of doing this process, and I would very much want to know where I went wrong.

Thanks for all the contributions.

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hard drive - How to disable or choose the 'correct' windows boot manager?