BCD, boo, hiss!
Posted: 08 Dec 2012, 00:30
Ideal Friday night activity (dream world)
Involves the cute strawberry blonde at the bus stop. If I weren't a nerd, that is.
Actual Friday night activity
Two hour crash course into the Boot Configuration Data file, the Windows Registry (!!) file that tells Windows Boot Manager what it's able to boot up into. I've been on my old P4 laptop for a few nights, as my new PC wouldn't boot.
So far:
• Confirmed that Filco keyboards really don't work at the BIOS of modern PCs. I've been using my Acer 6312-TW via a Blue Cube for F12 etc, then the Filco for all the letters that don't work after obviously failing to reattach the membrane to the controller after its photo session.
• You have to disable Safe Boot before attempting to repair the HDD otherwise it's totally invisible to everything.
• A 6-year-old copy of Knoppix on my CD pile reads my drive perfectly in UEFI boot mode. From here, and only here, I was able to figure out where the BCD file lives. When Windows 8's Pastel Blue Screen of Death says "\BCD", it really means "\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD on the Supar Sekrit boot partition you didn't know you had that won't show up under the recovery console".
• You can break into these stupid partitions using diskpart to map a drive letter. This step is missing from every frigging BCD repair guide on all the internets. The problem is that sometimes you have to wipe and recreate the BCD, and this is only possible if you've actually assigned a drive letter to the partition it lives on.
(Part of the delay is that I've had to borrow a Windows 8 DVD from a colleague thanks to Dell's order system lying about me getting a Windows 8 DVD of my own. Apparently I didn't order one, when I most definitely did.)
I can now boot directly into Windows 8 (without having to select the HDD from the F12 boot menu) and hibernate is functional. I think it was the modification to the BCD required for hibernation (sets Windows Resume as the default boot target in Windows Boot Manager) that went subtly wrong and left a missing entry out somewhere.
I have no idea whether all the other guff got put back into the BCD – memory testing boot, recovery boot etc. I do have recovery partitions, but I presume I can only access them from within Windows 8 when Windows 8 is already working, as you need to boot Windows 8 to set boot options, so what the use of this BCD file is, goodness only knows. It's just an excuse to overcomplicate.
Still, I managed to draw force graphs 1 and 3 using just my four-button laptop trackpad. The extra buttons really helped, as I could zoom and pan directly from the trackpad's dedicated upper middle button. Bless my laptop :)
Involves the cute strawberry blonde at the bus stop. If I weren't a nerd, that is.
Actual Friday night activity
Two hour crash course into the Boot Configuration Data file, the Windows Registry (!!) file that tells Windows Boot Manager what it's able to boot up into. I've been on my old P4 laptop for a few nights, as my new PC wouldn't boot.
So far:
• Confirmed that Filco keyboards really don't work at the BIOS of modern PCs. I've been using my Acer 6312-TW via a Blue Cube for F12 etc, then the Filco for all the letters that don't work after obviously failing to reattach the membrane to the controller after its photo session.
• You have to disable Safe Boot before attempting to repair the HDD otherwise it's totally invisible to everything.
• A 6-year-old copy of Knoppix on my CD pile reads my drive perfectly in UEFI boot mode. From here, and only here, I was able to figure out where the BCD file lives. When Windows 8's Pastel Blue Screen of Death says "\BCD", it really means "\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\BCD on the Supar Sekrit boot partition you didn't know you had that won't show up under the recovery console".
• You can break into these stupid partitions using diskpart to map a drive letter. This step is missing from every frigging BCD repair guide on all the internets. The problem is that sometimes you have to wipe and recreate the BCD, and this is only possible if you've actually assigned a drive letter to the partition it lives on.
(Part of the delay is that I've had to borrow a Windows 8 DVD from a colleague thanks to Dell's order system lying about me getting a Windows 8 DVD of my own. Apparently I didn't order one, when I most definitely did.)
I can now boot directly into Windows 8 (without having to select the HDD from the F12 boot menu) and hibernate is functional. I think it was the modification to the BCD required for hibernation (sets Windows Resume as the default boot target in Windows Boot Manager) that went subtly wrong and left a missing entry out somewhere.
I have no idea whether all the other guff got put back into the BCD – memory testing boot, recovery boot etc. I do have recovery partitions, but I presume I can only access them from within Windows 8 when Windows 8 is already working, as you need to boot Windows 8 to set boot options, so what the use of this BCD file is, goodness only knows. It's just an excuse to overcomplicate.
Still, I managed to draw force graphs 1 and 3 using just my four-button laptop trackpad. The extra buttons really helped, as I could zoom and pan directly from the trackpad's dedicated upper middle button. Bless my laptop :)