Tuesday 3 April 2018

bcdedit - Problem recreating BCD on Windows 7 64bit - The requested system device cannot be found


NVIDIA drivers upgrade crashed my Windows 7 installation, so I'm working to undo the damage.


What I can do: I can boot Windows install from the USB drive, and I can boot the Hiren's Boot CD. Although automated Windows repair fails, I can get to command prompt when I boot Windows install from USB drive, and I can see my drive and all my data.


What I cannot do: I cannot boot into Windows - I get this message:


Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:
1. Insert Windows CD and run a repair your computer option.
File: /Boot/BCD
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: an error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data.

It seems that something is wrong with my /Boot/BCD, so I'm trying to recreate it from scratch. I've tried all the methods detailed here (including Windows repair which fails), and I'm left with the last one (near the bottom of that page). When I type the following command as in the tutorial:


bcdedit.exe /import c:\boot\bcd.temp

...it fails with the following error:


The store import operation has failed.
The requested system device cannot be found.

Many Google results say that I must use diskpart to set my partition active, however it's already set as active.


Also, when I try this:


bcdedit /enum

It fails with similar message:


The boot configuration data store could not be opened.
The requested system device cannot be found.

Does anyone know what does that error message mean, and what is the requested system device?


I'd like to avoid having to reinstall Windows since all the files on disk seem to be fine.



Answer



So, here's how I finally solved it.


Recreating BCD as in the "nuclear holocaust" chapter of the tutorial I mentioned in my question worked in the end, but with one small modification. I got the idea in this thread. It seems that the message I got was telling me that bcdedit cannot find the BCD store. So, instead of typing this:


bcdedit /import c:\boot\bcd.temp

...I only needed to manually point to the store:


bcdedit /store c:\Boot\BCD /import c:\boot\bcd.temp

This is also needed for the rest of commands in tutorial:


bcdedit /store c:\Boot\BCD 

With that modification, all the commands in tutorial work as expected. When I recreated BCD, I was able to boot my original Windows.


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