Topic: 2017 Top 10 Windows / Linux / Mac tools to repair MBR/BCD/GRUB/EFI/UEFI

[devnullius]

If you ever find yourself in need to fix the MBR, the LILO/Grub/Grub2 bootmanager, the Windows BCD or boot.ini or EFI/UEFI  boot files and boot managers and boot loaders, these programs might help you...

I wrote this article after on one of my systems all OS's suddenly gave me a 0xc0000000e blue-ish error screen (even for my Linux entries) after cloning said disk... (clonezilla and maybe with Gparted too?). After a few days of trying to repair my system, I encountered this error twice. I still don't know why. It might be because I changed something to the BCD. What I do know is that Windows first boots ok, then at shut down you'll get a message stating that changes are being made to the machine and to wait until it's done (might take a minute). After the reboot? Often I'd get 0xc000000e : ( Solution there? Simple. Boot into safe mode Another problem solved! Mystery remaining: how the f did Windows Repair make my bootable Paragon USB pen drive the bootloader for my hard drive...? Including blue screening if I'd detach the USB stick after Windows was booted ;p I tried to copy the USB's BCD files to my boot partition, but.. that failed too : )


So here are some tools to help you out!

1. TIP! Free: if you have Windows running: EasyBCD by https://neosmart.net/Store/

2. Commercial: Windows recovery only: Easy Recovery Essentials bootdisk (EasyRE) by  https://neosmart.net/EasyRE/
This one failed for me and it probably is me, but... ;p Give it a try, it won't boot for me atm. You can easily find a torrent for the bootdisk... Try Bit Che.

3. Commercial: Windows recovery only: Active@ Data Studio 10's // Active@ BootDisk 10's  Bootable Configuration (BCD) Editor by http://www.boot-disk.com/bootable-configurator-manager.htm. You can easily find a torrent for the bootdisk... Try Bit Che. Once booted, you can find the Bootable Configuration Editor under the System menu. I didn't care much for this one (no real repair options).

4. TIP! Commercial: Windows BCD recovery and more: Hard Disk Manager 15 Boot Recovery by https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-professional/
You can easily find a torrent for the bootdisk... Try Bit Che.

5. Free: Visual BCD Editor and Dual-boot Repair Windows 10 (and 8.1/8/7/Vista/XP) by http://www.boyans.net.
Dual-boot Repair tool needs a working Windows installation, but then it's great to have around.
Visual BCD Editor doesn't have the nicest GUI BUT it saved me from a strange problem I encountered... Whenever I tried to backup the BCD I would get an error. Turns out, there were hidden entries in my boot menu! They were for old recovery consoles... No idea where they were, most programs wouldn't show them and everything seems to work just fine; just exporting as a backup would fail. When I saw those entries with Visual BCD Editor I could right-click to remove them after selecting them and ignoring the big error that would pop up (with an urgent request to email the developers with the logs). Once the entries were gone, I could export the BCD just fine

6. Windows only: manually, with the Windows installation DVD. Start here https://kb.acronis.com/content/1507 and here https://tweakhound.com/2012/11/13/how-to-fix-the-windows-bootloader/. This is an interesting read too: https://superuser.com/questions/460762/how-can-i-repair-the-windows-8-efi-bootloader.

7. TIP! Free: Windows and Linux boot-repair-disk by https://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/, also advised by JHeysen (sort of).  It contains a small Linux distro with Boot-Repair and not much else besides gparted.
While this program really knows its Linux boot managers, it failed for me because my RAID volume wasn't complete... (don't ask*) and the program aborted. Still, I liked this program best and it was the inspiration to write this article It handles all (Windows) thingies you might need!

8. TIP! Free: Windows and Linux Rescatux live CD by http://www.supergrubdisk.org/

9. Commercial: EasyUEFI Enterprise.2.9 by http://www.easyuefi.com/comparison.html.
You can easily find a torrent for it and create the boot disk... Try Bit Che.

10. If you are really giving up... Ultimate DLCD Boot 2015 and Ultimate DLC Boot 2016 v3.2.
* https://onedrive.live.com/?id=A88A9C6DA0D80E4F!129&cid=A88A9C6DA0D80E4F
* http://dlcboot.com/download.html

11. Commercial: Firesage MBRWizard Suite (MBR only). Read more here http://scforum.info/index.php?topic=8556.0


Peace!

Devnullius




* got it solved later when I tried to install ZevenOS. No hard disk was shown, even after some bios changes. Luckily, I quickly found the solution! https://askubuntu.com/questions/21267/why-doesnt-the-installer-see-all-of-my-hard-drives. I indeed used to have a mirrored NVIDIA RAID in this PC; ZevenOS was the only one whom could handle that chipset from the go. And while I had removed all partitions of the old installations, somewhere somehow there was a hidden 'stamp' on my old multi-boot hard disk. This article explains dmraid -rE

[jheysen]

Ubuntu live stick? :p

[devnullius]

Ubuntu live stick? :p

boot-repair utility will be mentioned next in the 'edit'; I mean, that's what you meant, right? Right??



x Devvie

[jheysen]

Haha, a lot more basic... in the form of "update-grub" and "install-grub" :p

[devnullius]

Haha, a lot more basic... in the form of "update-grub" and "install-grub" :p

Yeah that won't work if you are not using GRUB. Not everybody is mainstream. Some of us use ZevenOS or MINT Linux... BSD things even! ;p
Also, some of us have hidden bootable tool partitions, Windows 2k8R2 & Win 10 running... Also, I don't want to have Windows started by GRUB (ugly!), I want native Windows boot manager with options for Linux boot... I like pretty things!

So... That's why that won't fly

xx Devvie