Setup Installation :: How To Restore Windows 8 Boot Options Menu
May 18, 2014
my OS is Windows 8.1 64-bit. It boots just fine, but I suddenly found out that something wrong happened with my BCD store. Tried more workarounds but none worked. The last I found How To Restore Windows 8 Boot Options Menu ended on bcdedit error mentioned below. The problem indicates with following signs:
- bcdedit /enum prints error "The boot configuration data store could not be opened."
- bcdboot C:windows prints error "BFSVC Error: BcdOpenSystemStore failed with unexpected error code, Status
= [c000015c]"
- msconfig's boot tab shows empty OSes list (nothing on the tab is clickablle)
- the same with System Properties, Advanced tab, Startup and Restore dialog (OS dropdown has no entries)
- Trying to enter diagnostic boot by Shft + Restart doesnot seem to offer full recovery menu. It boots to GUI boot menu offering Continue or Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting submenu offers Manage UEFI options (this brings me to BIOS setup after reboot) and Shut down. No manage boot options, no other choices.
All of this point me to that my booting configuration is somehow ill (I wonder a bit that Windows still can start).
I partitioned my hard drive and installed a second copy of my Windows 8.1
I like to experiment with registry settings, tweaks, etc so I use the second installation as a guiney pig, leaving my primary copy untouched.
My question is how to I get the second copy listed on the graphical Boot Options Menu? Right now, I have to press [ESC] on reboot to select it in BIOS settings.
I have installed Blue 8.1 on a separate drive in my system along side 8.0. When I restart the 8.0 boots unless I manually select the 8.1 drive in bios. How can I alter the Boot menu to add the option to boot from either OS?
So I am here trying to downgrade my Windows 8 laptop to Windows 7. (It is an ASUS X55U by the way)
Every time I go to advanced startup settings it doesn't show the troubleshoot option, only the Continue and Turn Off Your PC options. I've tried everything and the option won't appear.
I am trying to Boot to Boot Menu so I can select CD rom so i can Ghost image my wife win 8 laptop, the problem is Win 8 wont let me access the boot menu and i am not sure what to do. The brand new Laptop came with HHD and i want to capture the image via Ghost and then put the Ghost image in SSD ...
I have an older Dell laptop with no secure boot that has Windows 8.1. I shrank the partition and installed Linux for a dual boot setup. Normally I install the GRUB2 to the root of the Linux partition so I don't "see" the Linux installation at all until I use easybcd to create a boot menu item. Easybcd wipes out the pretty blue GUI boot screen and you end up with the black and white "legacy" menu. This was all expected.
Now the weird part. Sometimes when I boot the computer I get the black and white boot screen and sometimes I get the modern GUI boot screen. I prefer the black and white boot screen because the modern boot screen does a second reboot when you select a linux installation.
I have a desktop PC Acer XC600, the hard disk is formatted in the UEFI-Scheme. Now I want to do a clean install of a fresh Windows 8, but I cannot manage to boot into UEFI-mode, neither from DVD or USB.
I can reach a boot menu by pressing F12, but there is nothing like shown in the article about installing Windows 8 in UEFI mode. Only standard bios devices show up. There are simply no UEFI devices. I tried different usb sticks, dvds, formatted them different ways, but the best I can get is the point where setup says "cannot install because the disk is formatted GPT".
But the acutal system is definitely running in UEFI mode (?)
I bought a Windows 8 laptop, ASUS Q500A, and reformatted it with Windows 7.
I went into the BIOS and used "Restore Defaults" and now all Boot Option Priorities are deleted.
Each time I boot the laptop, it automatically goes to BIOS (or UEFI).
I tried inserting the Windows 7 disc so I can access Startup Repair or Command Prompt but it freezes before it could get anywhere even when I tried it with an external CD/DVD drive.
I cannot get the laptop to boot to the hard drive or CD drive at all,
how I can reset the boot option priorities so it will be boot to the hard drive again.
i installed monitoring and filtering software on the computer. my kids just restarted the computer and choose refresh and it was gone. in win 7 i set a new restore point and deleted the previous ones solving that problem. i know that there is a way to not allow using the system refresh with group policy and regedit hacks but i would not like to have to go down that road.
how can i control what the restore and refresh settings do?
I've got LATITUDE E7440 laptop with Win 8 Pro preinstalled. I need to disable driver signature enforcement in advanced options. I've read about how to do it in many places, but basically.. when I go to Troubleshoot -> Advanced options -> Startup Settings
And I push restart, menu for type of booting (below) doesn't appear. It just restarts as usual. Can I get to this menu in another way or why it doesn't appear?
I've got 4 laptops and this menu appeared only on one of them after restart. I've even reset it to its factory settings, but it didn't work out for me.
I’m experiencing this odd and selective issue of options missing from folder context menu, under the choice New in most folders. Certain folders seems to have all the options as should. Down's a pic of a usual situation and the rare occasion of full menu, with Finish OS.
A quick scoop around indicates that the few folders to have full options on drive C are Desktop and Program Data. Some seemingly random folders on other drives also provides the full menu, but most only the option for New folder. This has bugged me to a good degree lately and while doing so unnecessarily hindered my desktop work.
I'm running Windows 8 Pro x64 (non 8.1) with Start8 (v1.16).
I just got a refurbished ASUS K75DE laptop, and it came with Windows 8 on it. I am wanting to run a dual boot with Win7, so I disabled fast-boot just fine, and went into the UEFI BIOS and disabled the secure boot.
While I was there, I did like I have always done and set a BIOS boot-up password. I then proceed to boot to my Win7 installer USB Flash drive, but I was running low on battery power so I aborted the install and shut the computer down to try again later.
Now however when I get into BIOS to select boot priority, all options are grayed out except for system time and a few other non-essentials. At the bottom of the first BIOS screen it says "User Level : User" and I can't seem to find a way to reverse this issue. So now I'm stuck, can't boot to anything but the HDD because it is first by default.
Final steps in my recovery process. I'm running a Windows 8 recovery disc off of a USB, and I'm trying to restore, refresh, reset, anything at this point.
But I go into all the troubleshooting options and advanced options and it doesn't allow me to "choose a target operating system" as nothing appears such as my Windows 8.
I'm on an Asus laptop, I've backed-up my files to an external hdd, so at this point I just want to get my laptop running again.This all started with the "automatic repair loop" to which I've used EasyRE to purchase a recovery disc, backed up my files, and now I'm at this point where I can't finalize the process.
Also how should I be booting from a USB properly?I hold F2 on start up, switch to "Boot" and set "Launch CSM" to Enabled. Then switch to "Security" and set "Secure Boot Control" to Disabled. Then restart and hold Esc for the Boot menu and boot from the USB.
I'm willing to do whatever to simply reset my laptop. Tried everything that I've found, text in that black command box (I'm really not too flash with computers) like the chkdsk and it all came out fine. It's just when I go to try to recover/restore/reset ANYTHING when I've booted from the USB it tells me there isn't an operating system to do so from.
I have been using Windows 7 Pro (64) for several years, and today installed a newly purchased Windows 8 Pro (64) OS. I looked on-line and found many articles on how to multi-boot back to Windows 7 after installing Windows 8, and believe I have done this correctly (more below), but when booting up I do not ever see a multi-boot menu, my system boots directly into Windows 8.
When installing Win 8, I booted from my CD/DVD drive with the Win 8 OS media in the drive. (I had previously reduced the volume of my Windows 7 drive and created a new partition that I called "Windows8". ). At the appropriate time in the Win 8 install I chose "Custom", then chose the newly created "Windows 8" partition, then proceeded with the Win 8 OS install. As mentioned above, I do not see the multi-boot menu when booting up, however when in Windows 8 I can see the Windows 7 drive in "Computer", so it was not over-written.
Startup Options - Choose a Default OS to Run at Startup in Windows 8
and am wondering if I should try Options 2 through 4 (1 of)? I build my own PCs so know something about PC's, bt not much about booting to an OS.....
Another options might be installing a third party boot manager, which I have not yet done.
my reason for getting back to Win 7 is to be able to use the PC while I learn and setup Win 8 over time. I went into this believing that getting a multi-boot capability would be very easy.
So recently I was switching my desktop background repeatedly, trying out a few images because i wanted to change it. I had been using the right click menu on images, using the available option to 'set as desktop background'. Then, for no apparent reason that option dissapeared, along with the bolded 'open', 'edit', and 'print' options. not only that, but it seems to have slightly rearranged the menu as well as added a few new 'options' that do absolutely nothing when i try to use them.
Preview, rotate right, and rotate left do nothing whatsoever. Open would have opened it in an image viewer i downloaded and set to default, and edit would have opened it in Paint. Images aren't the only things affected. it seems to have happened to .txt files and video files, except the preview and rotate options don't appear.
I can still double click to open these files in their default programs, and use the newly bolded 'open with' drop-down menu to open image sin paint, but it would be nice to have my normal options back.
the hard disk of a Samsung Ultra 5 crashed. I have got a new hard disk. How do i restore windows 8 and Samsung drivers to the new hard disk? My friend has an exact notebook. How do i copy the recovery partition from his pc and use it on mine?
After creating a UEFI bootable USB thumb drive with Rufus (using Windows 8.1 Enterprise ISO x64), for a Dell Optiplex 3010 (configured as UEFI only, no CSM, latest firmware version, Windows 8 installed), I didn't see a USB boot option, so I tried to add one manually. Unfortunately I erased the existing boot option (boot manager) by mistake. Although there were two boot options for PXE booting, the machine will not start anymore, even when there is an active WDS server on the network.
I also see Led's 2 and 3 lighting up, meaning according to the manual 'hardware ok but bios possibly damaged/corrupt'.
I understand I cannot start the machine from a bios boot disk because of GPT partitioning, and the UEFI USB boot disk I made might be corrupt (as it didn't show up as a boot option), however I don't understand why it won't boot from the PXE network card, as these boot options are still there.
I used to use Windows Easy Transfer to backup my settings and files before reinstalling/reimaging...etc - now that doesn't exist, and File History really doesn't cut it when it comes to apps and settings.
A system image really won't work either, as I need to reinstall windows 8.1 on a new system with different partitioning...etc.
Are there any Windows 8.1 native tools that will do it? If not, are there any freeware apps that perform the equivalent?
I have checked out Paragon Backup and Recovery (more all-or-nothing) and D7 (freeware version doesn't have automated restore - but it does create registry dumps...hmmm) but neither seems to work as simply/well as WET used to.
I have tried just saving the User profile folder, but unfortunately, that doesn't save anything that's in the registry (outlook profiles, app settings...etc).
I have a USB HDD for my laptop (About 1TB). If worse comes to worse, is it possible to restore from System Image that I create on that USB HDD, or does it have to be a USB flash drive?
My son decided to reset his windows 8 laptop to original factory settings, during the reset process his mom decided it was taking to long and turned off the laptop.
Now when its turned on it shows the message "restoring your computer", this message will then change to "diagnosing your computer", the screen will then go blank and it start all over again.
I can boot it from a USB drive, but when I click on "repair" i get an error message that it cant repair the computer. When i try to run restore from the USB I get a similar message.
is there anyway to run the system restore from the DOS prompt?
I'm mostly a Linux user, but I recently bought a laptop with Windows 8 on it. After a few days dual booting I decided it wasn't for me, so I decided to delete the windows partitions and usa just Linux. I would like, however, to keep the recovery partition, so to be able to easily reinstall Windows again if I felt like I needed to, but I'm not sure what partitions should I keep. Here's a picture of my hard drive partitions as of now:
Do I need more than the restore partition? Can I get rid of the boot one? What about the recovery one? And the one flagged msftres?
I've had Win 7 Pro on my laptop for over a year. I installed a 2nd hard drive to it recently and today I installed Windows 8 Pro on the 2nd hard drive. It's been a roller coaster of good & bad luck.
The first install went fine, until I tried to install the Windows 8.1 upgrade from the Windows store, then things went bad and I had to go into Windows 7 and eventually delete the Windows 8 volume and change it from MBR to GPT because of UEFI (no secure boot enabled). What a stretch of error messages telling me I can't install Windows 8 on the blank hard drive because it was or wasn't MBR or GPT, or the automagically made partitions weren't in the right order.
After spending over 7 hours twice in a row installing Windows 8, I finally find out that there's no boot option for Windows 7 anymore.
The only clue I have is to use a Windows 7 repair disk and use diskpart.exe and make the Win 7 drive "active" but that's a little foreign to me at this point.
I'm looking in Computer Management / Disk Management from within Windows 8.
Disk 0: SYSTEM D: 438 MB NTFS (lengthened from 199 MB with EaseUS because Acronis 2014 thought it too small while crashing), Healthy (Active, Primary Partition); Win 7 E: 930.98 GB NTFS Healthy (Primary Partition); HP_TOOLS F: 102 MB FAT 32 Healthy (Primary Partition)
I have a multiple operating system and used to get the blue graphical boot menu with a rectangle with the name of each operating system in it. After a few boots it went back to the text menu, and only returned a couple of times. Is there a way to get the graphical boot menu back permanently? It looks a lot nicer. I have XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 .....
I have dual booted my lappy with win7 ultimate and Windows 8 pro using vhd.i have installed windows8 on vhd,but due to that i can't use the fast start and system rating in Windows 8.so i want to restore my Windows 8 vhd to my hardisk. I have 4 partitions on my hardisk i can use any one of them to recover win 8.
I would like to reinstall Win 8 on my ASRock UEFI motherboard in the UEFI mode. I have Win 7 OEM and the downloaded Win 8 Pro upgrade. I have the Win 8 Pro upgrade burned to an ISO disc. I also have the hard drive backed up to Acronis 2013 and have an Acronis WinPE rescue disc to boot with to restore.
Several questions. (1) If I convert to UEFI and format the drive to GPT, will Acronis restore to the GPT (from MBR)? (2) If Acronis won't restore, will converting to UEFI/GPT affect installing or activating the Win 7 OEM and/or the Win 8 Pro upgrade (I assume I'll have to install Win 7 and then upgrade to Win 8). (3) Will a UEFI system read other hard drives that are MBR formatted?
I have 10 computers with identical hardware that all have their own oem license. What I want is to have the same setup on all 10 computers. What I remember from previous Windows versions is that you had to activate Windows individually with its own oem key for every computer you restored with a preferred disk image. From what I read the product key procedure is a bit different in Windows 8 and that the key is stored in the bios? The activation should also be handled automatically by Windows, is that correct?
So what I really wonder is: Do I still have to activate every restored pc manually or will Windos 8 do this for me?
A second related question: Are there any imaging/cloning software that can be set up to promt me for a new computer name in the restore process?
