Need help to fix the boot loader

Winuser said:

It's worth a try. If you post what motherboard or BIOS your computer is using, maybe someone will know what setting you changed

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The motherboard is an ASrock UFI version B85M-ITX P2.50 Chipset version: C2
At the exit from the bios it has the saving instruction plus this other option "load UEFI defaults" but there is no option to go back to the original setting

Another setting I am questioning is In one place it says "Secure boot State Disabled " but that is just a statement it cannot be changed than below that there is a setting for Secure boot which I set to enabled so that seems to conflict with the secure boot statement

FreeBooter said:

Are you executing the bootrec command from Windows 11 recovery environment?

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No that was just from the cmd I don't think I can go into recovery environment without windows 11 dvd

MikeYants said:

No that was just from the cmd I don't think I can go into recovery environment without windows 11 dvd

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The booted Windows does not support Bootrec only Windows recovery environment support this command.

In this guide, you will learn the steps to use Rufus to download the ISO file and create a bootable media to install Windows 11 from scratch.

I reset the bios but it did not detect my other drives but it did reset to secure boot to disabled
I will try to unplug the drive see if that does anything

FreeBooter said:

In this guide, you will learn the steps to use Rufus to download the ISO file and create a bootable media to install Windows 11 from scratch.

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Thanks. I will try that later Will a windows 7 recovery dvd work to be able to use the bootrec command

Here is another oddball situation When I was looking at easy bcd in the windows 10 desktop it was showing windows 11 and even using msconfig it was showing windows 11 but now that I unplugged the windows 11 hard drive the easy bcd and msconfig show nothing for the boot How can I boot to windows 10 and not show the os booted ? Strange
I will try the other drive and see what happens

I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the second drive but for some reason it is not recognizing it although it did recognize the dvd when I connected it
Well that's it for today Tomorrow I will try the windows 7 dvd I hope I can fix it and not don't have to reinstall windows

MikeYants said:

Here is another oddball situation When I was looking at easy bcd in the windows 10 desktop it was showing windows 11 and even using msconfig it was showing windows 11 but now that I unplugged the windows 11 hard drive the easy bcd and msconfig show nothing for the boot How can I boot to windows 10 and not show the os booted ? Strange
I will try the other drive and see what happens

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Did you shutdown the computer and then disconnect the Windows 11 drive or just disconnect the drive? There should always be a boot option showing. I'm wondering if the boot partition for Win 10 got moved to the drive with Windows 11. It happened to me years ago. For now I think it would be best to get Win 10 working correctly and then concentrate on getting Win 11 and Win 7 working. Keep the Win 11 and Win 7 drive disconnect for now. My dual boot problem was caused by me not disconnection the Windows OS drive before installing the other Windows OS to the second drive. I didn't know it until I removed the second drive because I decided I didn't want to dual boot anymore. To boot I had to reconnect the second drive until I got the problem fixed.

MikeYants said:

I reset the bios but it did not detect my other drives but it did reset to secure boot to disabled
I will try to unplug the drive see if that does anything

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I think the BIOS only sees drives that are bootable.

After getting Win 10 working correctly there is a last ditch effort to get Win 7 and Win 11 working without losing anything. I say last ditch because I would only do it if nothing else works. It will require making system images of Win 7 and Win 11 from within Win 10. The rescue disk for the imagining program you used for to make the images. I prefer Macrium. The free version is still available if needed. The install disk for Win 7 and Win 11. You will be installing the two Windows version over the old versions. With only the drive for the OS your installing and the install disk connected do a clean install. Let's start with Win 7. after Win 7 is installed, restore just the old Win 7 partition over the new Win 7 partition. If done correctly you will have you old Win 7 back up and running again. Then do the same with Win 11. Once you have Win 11 up and running, connect all drives and restart the computer. You may have to enter the BIOS to select the Boot drive order that you want. Once your primary build is running use EasyBCD or msconfig to add the other OSs to the boot menu. It's a lot of work and I would only do it if you find you have no other choice.

Winuser said:

Did you shutdown the computer and then disconnect the Windows 11 drive or just disconnect the drive? There should always be a boot option showing. I'm wondering if the boot partition for Win 10 got moved to the drive with Windows 11

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Yes I did shut down and then disconnected It's possible that the partition got moved but how you explain the situation now that I disconnected the windows 11 there is nothing showing in easybcd or msconfig ? Is that just a name and it's not really needed to boot ? How could I use the easybcd to add the windows 10 to any other os to dual boot ?

Winuser said:

I think the BIOS only sees drives that are bootable.

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I think you are right about that So I think it can see the drive but cannot set it as active It's a bit strange the way the bios is set up I have 2 different sections on the boot priorities
The first section is under the heading Boot option priority and it has 3 options below
The options are any one or more the disks or dvd and windows boot manager

Than under that there are 2 more section
One is the cd/dvd BBS priority so that is just for the dvd
The other is the hard drive BBS priority and that is for the hard drive but it only has room for 2 so not sure where the third one ends up

I only used the top section to set the priority so it may have been listed in the BBS priority but because it was not bootable maybe that's why it did not show up in the top section
I am currently using the windows boot manager to boot into windows 10 so maybe that is why it's not shown in the easybcd it does not boot from the hard drive

MikeYants said:

Yes I did shut down and then disconnected It's possible that the partition got moved but how you explain the situation now that I disconnected the windows 11 there is nothing showing in easybcd or msconfig ? Is that just a name and it's not really needed to boot ? How could I use the easybcd to add the windows 10 to any other os to dual boot ?

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I'm baffled as to why Win 10 is booting and the entry doesn't show. If you have a image made of Win 10 see what happens if you enter the Win 10 entry in EasBCD or msconfig. As for getting Win 7 and Win 11 working, work on them one at a time with only the one drive connected. That way there's less chance of messing up Win 10.

About the last ditch effort I would not be able to do it because I don't have a windows 11 disk but I have one on order so that will take some time
What do you think about the mini tool partition wizard ? Do you think I can use that to restore the MBR ?

Winuser said:

If you have a image made of Win 10 see what happens

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Unfortunately I don't have a disk for the windows 10 I got the pc with windows 10 preinstalled

MikeYants said:

Than under that there are 2 more section
One is the cd/dvd BBS priority so that is just for the dvd
The other is the hard drive BBS priority and that is for the hard drive but it only has room for 2 so not sure where the third one ends up

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I didn't read the whole thread but see if anything on this link is of any help. [SOLVED] - Bbs boot priority issue

I think I made it worse by using the diskpart to set the active partition I tried to use the windows 7 to get to the cmd prompt to see if I can restore the windows 7 boot record but it fails when I try to make it active because I think it sees it as a different system with this efi nonsense I even tried to install windows and it cam up with an error with something similar So i would probably need to make a new partition and install windows 7 to that partition

Good news ! I got it working
I read some discussion about MBR that the boot from one drive maybe on the opposite drive so I installed both drives the windows 10 and 7 and used the windows 7 dvd to get to the command prompt and tried to make the windows 7 partition active but I got an error saying The update may be unreliable since the volume could not be locked during the update Access denied
So than I decided to run the windows 7 dvd and this time it recognized all the drives and partitions 10 and 7 so than I just used the repair and it found the boot manager missing or corrupt error but it repaired it so after that I could boot into any of the drives the only difference now on the boot manager is listing the drive with (recovered) next to it Not sure if that can be edited somehow but that's a minor visual issue the main thing is that it all works as before I added windows 11
Even on the esybcd shows them as (recovered)
I think I may delay installing windows 11 until windows 10 is no longer supported What a nightmare that was
Thanks for all the help

MikeYants said:

I don't have a windows 11 disk but I have one on order so that will take some time
What do you think about the mini tool partition wizard ? Do you think I can use that to restore the MBR ?

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Do you not have a USB stick? If you do it needs to be at leased 8Gb or larger and make a Windows 10 or 11 installation disk using that!

I use "Disk Genius" for partitioning etc... and you could look at the current boot entries Windows is using. And whether Disks use GPT or MBR.
Install the program and use it to create a Win PE bootable USB stick. DiskGenius: Data Recovery, Partition Manager, Backup & Disk Utilities

Windows 7 used to install MBR by default, but can installed in UEFI as well.

I suspect Win 7 is in MBR... but I could be wrong... So giving you all the problems you’re having.

Update: Glad you nearly fixed it... but you would still be better off going with UEFI, then you can install Win 11 with no issues.
You can convert Win 7 and Win 10 disks to GPT with the built cmd in both versions of Windows via the MBR2GPT conversion tool.

Personally if you have a spare HD, install Win 7 in UEFI mode then copy and paste your current Win 7 partition (from the MBR disk) onto the new UEFI disk.
Repair the bootsec on the UEFI disk, job done.

I would not have had any problems if Windows 11 wasn't so slow so I had to mess with it. It was taking 3 minutes to load just for comparison I just timed my windows 10 and it was less than 1 minute About 59 seconds which is twice as long as windows 7 but 3 times less than windows 11
I think Windows 11 was having some other issues because when I tried to run the DISM command it would top at around 62%

I still have to look into using windows 10 more because I need it for a software that no longer works with windows 7 so I need some software to move the sizes around When I first got this pc many years ago I was not planing to use it because it was so slow in comparison to windows 7 so I shrunk the windows 10 partition quite a lot so the hard drive is working overtime now accessing the disk At the time I installed Windows 7 on the rest of the partition Since then I got another drive and installed windows 7 and that is the main one I use daily So I was thinking to either shrink the old windows 7 or see if there anything important on it and delete it and than expand the windows 10 in that drive

You are correct about windows 7 being MBR I am just so hesitant now to use UEFI and mess things up again
Would using UEFI make any difference in the booting speed ? I guess you would probably not know unless you had both versions to compare

I am getting a windows 11 dvd this weekend so I may just play with that but disconnect the other drives so it would not affect anything I could not use all 3 drives and the dvd anyway because I only have 3 power cables but I ordered a y splitter that should come next week than if I can boot windows 11 at near the speed of windows 10 I will use it other wise I would try to make the windows 10 more usable