Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 System Will NOT Boot After Making Changes To Boot Manager Using BCDEdit
I messed up. It happens to everyone from time to time. In my case, I was playing around with my system boot manager because I wanted to setup Boot To VHD. Well being tired and not thinking to clearly, I made the changes to the {current} boot item instead of the new one I had just created. You guessed it… After making this mistake my machine would no longer boot. Since it is Saturday late afternoon and I have to be on stage in Boston on Monday, I need to fix it NOW!
I had two options…
1) Restore from backup: Yes, I have a backup of my entire machine from just a few days ago. However, since then I have added some 20 virtual machines to this windows Server 2008 R2 machine and I really do not want to do that again. If I have to go this way, It is going to be a very long weekend.
2) Figure out how to fix my screw up: This is the option I chose and I am glad I did. After about 30 mins of playing with it, I got everything back up and running. Add another couple hours to create this post for you and I am ready to get back to work.
I am not going to bother telling you all the things that I tried that did not work, it is safe to say that I got pretty familiar with the BCDEdit tool using the /? key :) I also tried the automated repair but the first time I tried it I had several drives plugged into the system and the repair did not work so great.
You can find details of the BCDEdit.exe tool here:
Bcdedit.EXE - I did not find this one particularly useful
BCDEdit.EXE Command-Line Options – This one is for Vista
I am hopeful as the Windows 7 and 2008 R2 Product Releases to General Availability, that the documentation will get better!
I could not find any good resources for the tool (other than the /? for help on the tool). There is a Microsoft site on BCDEdit but I found that link to be pretty useless because the word docx requires a password which I do not know. I will see about getting that fixed.
However, I will share what did work so you do not have to struggle with it.
I disconnected all but my boot drive and DVD drive. I booted from a Windows Server 2008 R2 DVD (if you are on Vista or Windows 7 or Server 2008, use that DVD instead). While it was on the screen asking me what language I wanted I pressed Shift-F10 (sorry no screenshot, will try to add one next week when I have more time). This dropped me to a command prompt. From the command prompt, I browsed to see what my drive letters were and what files I had. The DVD for me happened to be the X drive. I drilled down on my cd to the Sources folder then the Recovery Folder and I found an executable called StartRep.exe (hum, that is interesting… Let’s see what it will do) I ran the file, it took about 20 seconds to scan my machine looking for problems and told me that if the problems were fixed, my machine would boot after doing a restart. I restarted my machine and… OUTSTANDING my machine was booting normally. Deep breath and sigh of relief. Simple troubleshooting and I dodged a bullet. So the complete path to the file for me was x:\sources\recovery\StartRep.exe. I assume StartRep.exe stands for Start Repair.
It worked wonders for me and I can tell you that I LOVE SERVER 2008 R2 AND WINDOWS 7!
I could not get into my machine but my hypervisor would not boot any of my VM’s (major bummer). I was getting Event ID 14050 error messages. One more thing was needed. Because this is a Hyper-V machine I needed to tell the boot manager that it is using a hypervisor. From an elevated command prompt, I had to run the following…
bcdedit /set {current} hypervisorlaunchtype auto
Then POWER OFF AND UNPLUG the machine (not just restart)
I left it off for a minute, booted it back up and fired up a couple VM’s… SUCCESS!
Of, I am a bit particular because I noticed that the description of my boot was not “Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise (recovered)” and I did not want that so I needed to make one more change…
bcdedit /set {current} description “Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise”
This renamed the boot item and I now believe I am done! I ran BCDEdit again and all looks good.
Just in case you need it, after fixing my machine, I printed out the BcdEdit Details…
The TEXT Version…
C:\>bcdedit
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume1
path \bootmgr
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {3938319b-a727-11de-99f0-d2ca60b37081}
displayorder {current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
locale en-US
recoverysequence {3938319f-a727-11de-99f0-d2ca60b37081}
recoveryenabled Yes
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {91dd3e04-b052-11de-8ed0-806e6f6e6963}
hypervisorlaunchtype Auto
Graphic Version…
Here is what the BCDEdit looks like on my Windows 7 Machine that is setup for dual boot with the second boot partition being on a separate hard drive.
The text version…
C:\>bcdedit
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume1
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {fdf03d8b-19b0-11de-98ce-001c2512ad0f}
displayorder {fdf03d90-19b0-11de-98ce-001c2512ad0f}
{current}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 15
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {fdf03d90-19b0-11de-98ce-001c2512ad0f}
device partition=D:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows Server 2008 R2
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence {fdf03d91-19b0-11de-98ce-001c2512ad0f}
recoveryenabled Yes
osdevice partition=D:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {fdf03d8f-19b0-11de-98ce-001c2512ad0f}
nx OptOut
hypervisorlaunchtype Auto
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description Windows 7
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence {dfb74341-6571-11de-8673-002269c69093}
recoveryenabled Yes
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {fdf03d8b-19b0-11de-98ce-001c2512ad0f}
nx OptIn
The Graphic Version…
I hope if anyone out there makes the same mistake as me, you find this post and can fix it pretty easily. Once I get my Boot to VHD working (After Monday) I will do a Step By Step post on that process and put a link here.
