Corrupt Boot Manager / Missing Windows 8 Pro

Please assist with the following as I have read too many forums and attempted to resolve without success.
Problem: unable to boot into Windows 8.0 due to corrupt boot manager or missing boot manager.
Observed: Harddisk is recognized within bios. The disk cable is firmly connected. I hear the disk spinning. Bootrec commands have completed successfully.
Attempted to resolve by:
1. Bootrec commands (but will still will not boot).
2. Factory disk repair command
3. Ran chkdsk commands (there was some clusters that need to be reorganized).
My primary concern is that I need to access my data on the drive. Is there a file that I can download and install that will act as my new boot manager? Or how can I access the drive? Pulling it of the computer and installing in an HD dock
seemingly will not work because I need the bootmanger fixed?
Please advise. Many thanks,

Hi,
Firstly, I need to confirm your system edition, as you said unable to boot into Windows 8.0 but your provide this problem at Windows 7 forum.
About bootrec command to fix the boot manager problem, I would like to suggest you refer to the KB again and try its process for test.
Use Bootrec.exe in the Windows RE to troubleshoot startup issues:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392
If no use, please try to boot system into repair mode and using Startup Repair to fix system startup problem.
Roger Lu
TechNet Community Support

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Hi
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Thanks
Bye
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All the BCEDIT command line options are described here:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709667%28v=ws.10%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
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Hi,
Can you post back with the following.
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Hi Kerry
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"I work for HP."
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Can't boot into my windows pro 64 bit dvd to do clean install

I am trying to do a clean reinstall of Windows 7 Professional 64 bit (Brazilian Portuguese) I keep getting a request to select a cd-rom type 1 or 2. Neither works.
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I work for HP.
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Please mark Accept As Solution if this resolves your issue.

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Happy 2015 for all

Create a System Repair Disk on another Windows 7 computer to use your computer if it fixes anything.
If you live in the USA/Canada, call HP at this number 1-800-334-5144, and see if you can still get a set of recovery disks otherwise the WorldWide site:
http://welcome.hp.com/country/w1/en/support.html
If the recovery disks are not available through HP, they have them at Computer Surgeons:
http://www.computersurgeons.com/p-20621-recovery-kit-679228-002-for-hp-pavilion-entertainment-notebo...
Please mark my post as SOLVED if it has resolved your problem. It helps others with similar situations.

I cant restore my HP G62 notebook PC to factory setting as i get the message boot manager missing

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Boot Mgr missing

System displays BOOT MGR missing press alt/con/del. Doing built in system test HD test ok. Anyone hav an idea as to what is wrong.
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Boot Manager missing has to do with the way Windows starts. HERE is a Microsoft page that describes how to fix the problem. However, I would assume none of those options are user friendly enough for the average consumer user.
I would make sure there is nothing in the DVD/CD drive and no other USB devices connected, except for the keyboard and mouse, and then try to startup again. It could be something connected caused the OS to check in the wrong device for startup files.
Next, if things are no different, make a startup repair disk either on a working Windows 7 machine or get a retail install disk for Windows 7 or Vista. Boot to that and then pick repair starup instead of install.
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Windows boot manager boots almost fully into windows 8 before letting me select windows 7, at which point it reboots my computer

Hi,
I haven't used my slow HDD with windows 7 on it in a while, but today my SDD with windows 8 on it died. I have kept my old OS in a dual boot setup exactly for this rare possibility. I in fact successfully revived my SSD from windows 7.
During the restore procedure I had to boot into both OSes (7 and 8) several times before I managed to get 8 working. I tried a lot of things before one of them struck. (Is that how the phrase goes?
Me Hungary, no good speak English some times...) I am surprised to have found the following unexpected behavior of the new windows 8 branded boot loader:
The new windows boot manager boots almost fully into windows 8 before letting me select an OS.
If I select windows 7, it reboots my computer and loads windows 7, wasting a lot of time... on the windows 8 portion of the boot process, which is simply thrown away if I happen need windows 7 and not 8.
"This is highly inefficient!" — I almost exclaimed aloud... A boot manager should load just enough of itself so that a simple OS selection menu can be presented to the user with minimal keyboard interaction. Only when a selection is made should
it load an OS. I have no use for the new boot manager's mouse control support, and having it appear on the second screen in my dual screen setup is just plain scary. Use the main laptop monitor where the BIOS messages were displaying, and keep the secondary
off until the OS is done booting! By the time my secondary screen turns on, the boot selection menu disappears anyway.
Yes, I only noticed this problem now because I haven't booted into windows 7 for a long time. (300 MB worth of Windows updates were waiting for me indeed.) My boot selection menu timeout is set to 3 seconds instead of 30 so I don't have to pick windows 8
every time.
I am going to wait at least a week for the forum's input before I switch on my own to a faster, minimalist boot manager. I don't know what to use, I'm familiar with:
some minimalist bootstrap loaders
coreboot/linuxbios (recently learned of it)
bootcamp (not really)
acronis OS selector (discontinued before windows 8 came out, probably doesn't support it)
syslinux/isolinux (Linux only, I think)
old Windows bootmgr
more recent Windows ntldr
then this new "inefficient for dual booting" Windows 8 boot manager
and finally grub
Grub feels like the best option as it keeps the windows boot manager intact and supports mac, windows, and linux. All 3 of which will at one point — or has already — come up as a subject or prerequisite in my university.
I don't know how or why I was able to access windows 8's boot loader while my SSD was dead. Was it installed on the HDD, overwriting the windows 7 boot loader? That too is inefficient. I want to completely boot from my SSD. Don't spin up my HDD while I'm
booting my laptop on the go! The shaking of the vehicle I'm in could seriously damage the disk if I run into a pothole (common in my country) with just the right timing, data could be damaged. The entire reason windows 8 is on an SSD is so that it can boot
without accessing my HDD with all its moving parts. My goal with buying an SSD was for the HDD to remain safely offline while I'm in a shaky environment with potholes! Also, what if I want to disconnect the old HDD in the future... Or what if it dies? Will
the windows 8 boot loader die with windows 7? I want the two kept separately and completely independent from each other for exactly this reason.
In summary:
How can I stop windows 8 from almost fully booting before offering the dual boot OS selection menu? Do I need a better Boot loader?
Why was the boot loader that came with windows 8 still working OK while the SSD with windows 8 on it wasn't accessible? Did it sneak its way onto the old HDD? I want a 100% SSD-based boot process. What is the boot loader doing on a different drive? Its
place is on the SSD, with the operating system it belongs to. Not on the HDD of a different OS. Can I move it?
Sincerely,
Daniel "3ICE" Berezvai
p.s.: For windows 7 I only have a repair disk and hidden RECOVERY partition which I kept (came with the laptop, would rather not use it.) The Windows 8 pro DVD (purchased last year) is fine, but I had it moved to a bootable pendrive so I could remove my
optical drive and replace it with an SSD on which windows 8 is installed now. (I also have a vista ultimate DVD, as they were giving them away for free on a Microsoft conference. Funny story.)
p.p.s.: I am subscribed (☑ Alert me) to this topic and will respond to all questions and try all recommended actions right away.
http://3ice.hu/

Hi,
Thank you for your post.
From your description, I see the issue you are facing is there is no menu to choose OS when booting dual boot(Windows 7 & Windows 8). Please let me know if I have misunderstood anything.
It seems that the Windows 7 entry is missing, currently, we can use a tool –
EasyBCD to get it back. After downloading it, choose the Add/Edit panel item, select the OS you're missing and let the program detect it. Then simply click the Add button to add the missing OS entry.
At the meantime, here is a related link which demonstrates how to keep Windows 7 as the default OS in dual boot, you may use it for a reference.
How to Dual-Boot Windows 8 While Keeping Windows 7 As Your Default OS
http://blog.laptopmag.com/how-to-dual-boot-windows-8-while-keeping-windows-7-as-your-default-os
[Please Note: Since the website is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy
of this information.]
Regarding your second questions in your first post, you can refer to the following link to know more about dual boot.
Dual
Booting Explained: How You Can Have Multiple Operating Systems on Your Computer
http://www.howtogeek.com/187789/dual-booting-explained-how-you-can-have-multiple-operating-systems-on-your-computer/
[Please Note: Since the website is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy
of this information.]
Hopefully the information is helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for your time.
Best Regards,
Sophia Sun
Please remember to click “Mark as Answer” on the post that helps you, and to click “Unmark as Answer” if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Efibootmgr & gummiboot replaced UEFI entry for Windows Boot Manager

TLDR
I am now in Windows 7 and dual boot with Arch is working fine.
But before I update Arch, I would like to understand what happened, as in why adding an efibootmgr entry for Arch replaced/deleted the Windows Boot Manager entry although I followed the BG.
The status of my UEFI boot menu was, before the installation of Arch:
Windows Boot Manager
AHCI HDJ... (hard drive 1)
AHCI ST... (hard drive 2)
While working through the BG, I decided to use gummiboot=> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Be … #Gummiboot. So:
pacman -S gummiboot
gummiboot install
pacman -S efibootmgr
gummiboot install
[some error ocurred, as mentioned in red box]
efibootmgr -c -L "Gummiboot" -l /EFI/gummiboot/gummibootx64.efi
nano /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf
title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options root=/dev/sdb3 ro
[CTRL + X, Y, Enter]
exit
umount /mnt/{boot,home,}
reboot
I then saw a new list of the UEFI boot order:
Gummiboot
AHCI HDJ... (hard drive 1)
AHCI ST... (hard drive 2)
Chose Gummiboot and it brought up a gummiboot menu with entries
Arch Linux
Windows Boot Manager
EFI Shell something
Selected Arch Linux and it went to a message something along "boot device ' ' not found" and I was in a shell which was, I think, rootfs.
I rebooted via the button on my desktop and out the Arch Linux USB drive back. After mounting the partitions:
gummiboot remove
efibootmgr
[0000: Windows Boot Manager
[0001: Arch Linux
[0002: AHCI HDJ...
[0003: AHCI ST...
exit
umount /mnt/{boot,home,}
reboot
Now I booted into a black screen with white text which said something "Reboot and select proper Boot device"
=> Inserted Win 7 64-bit DVD, repaired the boot sector. Rebooted, saw I had these entries again:
Windows Boot Manager
AHCI HDJ... (hard drive 1)
AHCI ST... (hard drive 2)
The boot into Windows worked fine. Rebooted, chrooted into my install again and:
efibootmgr
[0000: Arch Linux
[0001: Windows Boot Manager
[0003: AHCI HDJ...
[0003: AHCI ST...
efibootmogr -b 0 -B
Then I used the EFISTUB method:
efibootmgr -c -L "Arch Linux" -l /vmlinuz-linux -u "root=/dev/sdb3 ro initrd=/initramfs-linux.img"
efibootmgr
[0000: Windows Boot Manager
[0001: Arch Linux
[0002: AHCI HDJ...
[0003: AHCI ST...
exit
umount /mnt/{boot,home,}
reboot
On reboot, 'Windows Boot Manager' was again replaced by 'Arch Linux'.
=> Inserted Win 7 64-bit DVD, repaired the boot sector.
Rebooted, I have now Windows Boot Manager + Arch Linux and dual boot works now.
My questions:
What is going on with efibootmgr replacing/deleting the Windows entry? Is there something wrong with my UEFI menu?
In connection with 1., I would like to sync the EFISTUB Kernel (wiki entry) before I run pacman -Syu. Can I do that now?
Can I uninstall gummiboot now?
Last edited by jones (2013-07-11 12:30:55)

henrik wrote:So in light of your post, I decided to ditch EFISTUB + gummiboot and try out GRUB. Thanks for clearing it up a bit. Which is what confuses me a great deal more, as GRUB/gummiboot obviously do not meddle with Microsoft's EFI files. Right?
EFI relies on two things to boot:
Boot loader program files on the ESP (or occasionally elsewhere).
NVRAM entries pointing to the boot loader files.
Your own problems seem to be with the NVRAM entries, not with the boot loader files themselves. Unfortunately, managing those NVRAM entries has proven to be problematic because of bugs in specific EFI implementations, bugs in efibootmgr and other tools that manipulate the NVRAM entries, poor documentation, and other factors.
To answer your question, though, no boot loader should mess with another's files. Such things can happen, though. The number of bugs that cause Microsoft's boot loader (EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi) to be treated deferentially have provoked some tools to use it as a target location for other boot loaders. (Ubuntu's Boot Repair tool does this in a rather overzealous way. So does my own rEFInd installer script, but only under certain narrow circumstances.) Also, the EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi file is a special case; it's the fallback bootloader that's used when NVRAM entries are missing or don't work, and various boot loader installation procedures place copies in that location, so it can be overwritten and could contain just about anything.
However, the whole thing happened again with GRUB. So I did the whole "repairing Boot problems" with the Windows DVD rescue thingy again and deleted all non-Microsoft files from the EFI partition, /dev/sda1.
Then I formatted / (root) and installed arch again and followed the Beginners' Guide which suggest mounting /dev/sda1/ to /mnt/boot (in contrast to the GRUB entry where the ESP should be mounted to /mnt/boot/efi).
I strongly advise against doing a complete re-installation just to overcome a boot loader problem. Instead, figure out what the problem is and fix it. Doing a complete re-installation is not likely to fix anything, and depending on precisely how you do it, you could end up with a more complex problem. The reason is that the re-installation is not likely to erase the NVRAM entries from the old installation, so you could find that you've got additional stray NVRAM entries. If you do happen to fix the problem by re-installing (say, because you selected a different installation option), you're not likely to know what changed to fix the problem, so you could end up in the same boat should you need to re-install again in the future.
But it did not show this line
Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda1
... how come??
I've given up trying to understand GRUB's configuration scripts. You could try creating an entry manually by editing /etc/grub.d/40_custom; or you could forget about using the GRUB scripts and create a hand-crafted grub.cfg; or you could forget about using GRUB at all. I'm not a fan of GRUB, so my personal choice is the final one.
So for all the headache and time ... should I delete the EFI partition and recreate it maybe? I think it's possible using the Windows 7 DVD.
But somehow using efibootmgr on my UEFI list somehow invalidated the Windows entry.
Reviewing your posts, it seems that you want to use the EFI stub loader directly, but you're having problems with that because when you add it to the NVRAM entries, Windows drops off your boot manager's boot options. The obvious solution to this problem is to forget about adding the EFI stub loader directly to the NVRAM entries, and instead add a boot manager that can handle either a Linux kernel or the Windows boot loader. (IMHO, this is the superior solution anyhow; I disagree with the Arch wiki's emphasis on using the EFI stub loader "raw.") It seems you were trying to do this with GRUB but had problems booting Windows. Earlier you tried gummiboot but had problems booting Linux. My suggestion is to either go back to gummiboot and fix its problem or try rEFInd. The "device not found" error you reported with gummiboot is usually caused by either a missing (or incorrectly-specified) initrd file or by an incorrectly-specified "root=" option passed to the kernel. Check those possitilities, and if you need help, report what happens in more detail. If necessary, take a digital photo of the screen and post it here. (Make sure it's legible, though!)
You can try rEFInd with minimal disk by using a CD-R or USB flash drive image. Boot with that and your NVRAM and ESP won't be affected at all. If you can get rEFInd working from the flash drive, you can then install it to your hard disk and it should continue working. Note that you probably won't be able to boot Linux directly from rEFInd with your current configuration without adding a "root=" specification to the kernel command line. You can do this by hitting F2 or Insert twice rather than launching Linux by pressing Enter. Alternatively, you can create a refind_linux.conf file in the directory that holds your kernel. That file's contents are described in the rEFInd documentation.

Corrupt Boot Manager / Missing Windows 8 Pro

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