Solved Cannot boot into Windows after formatting old system drive

I bought a bigger NVME drive and cloned my existing OS drive onto the new drive. Everything has been working for months so I formatted the old drive. After doing so, I cannot boot into Windows -- I am met with the "choose your keyboard layout" screen and the troubleshoot repair says it cannot fix anything. In cmd I can see the C: drive and all of the files on it.

I've run these:
chkdsk c: /f
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd

But the last one (rebuildbcd) does not work, I get error "The system cannot find the path specified". When I look at the partitions in diskpart, I don't see any boot drive listed. I have found a few posts online about this, but their situations are all different from mine, eg. they still have access to the old drive and they can move over the partition. So in my case, with no access to the old drive, how do I fix this? I have not done this before.

I've unplugged all other drives, so the only drive connected is the OS C: drive:

If you are seen "choose your keyboard layout" screen that means BCD store corrupted and need to be rebuilt.


Since the BCD store exists and lists a Windows installation, you'll first have to "remove" it manually and then try to rebuild it again.

At the Command Prompt, type below command as shown and then press Enter:


At the Command Prompt, type below command as shown and then press Enter:


The bcdedit command is used here to export the BCD store as a file: bcdbackup. There's no need to specify a file extension.

The command should return the following on screen:
The operation completed successfully.

Meaning the BCD export worked as expected.


At this point, you need to adjust several file attributes for the BCD store so you can manipulate it. At the prompt, execute the attrib commands exactly like this:


What you just did with the attrib command was remove the hidden, read-only, and system attributes from the file bcd. Those attributes restricted the actions you could take on the file. Now that they're gone, you can manipulate the file more freely - specifically, rename it.

To rename the BCD store, execute the ren command as shown:


Now that the BCD store is renamed, you should now be able to successfully rebuild it.

Try rebuilding the BCD again by executing the following, followed by Enter:


Restart your computer after rebuilding the BCD store.

You can try:

FreeBooter said:

At this point, you need to adjust several file attributes for the BCD store so you can manipulate it. At the prompt, execute the attrib commands exactly like this:

Code:

attrib c:\boot\bcd -h -r -s

What you just did with the attrib command was remove the hidden, read-only, and system attributes from the file bcd. Those attributes restricted the actions you could take on the file. Now that they're gone, you can manipulate the file more freely - specifically, rename it.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply! At the above step I get this error:
File not found - C:\boot\bcd

looks like volume 2 could be used as an esp but is a bit small.

I would boot up diskgenius and shrink the windows partition from the left by 450mb

then rt click the unallocated space and select create esp/msr accept the defaults and click Save all. It will ask if you want to format the esp immediately say yes.

still in diskgenius boot media, open cmd prompt and type bcdboot c:\windows

cant remember if diskgenius is in my 7171.iso

otherwise you can d/l the free version on a working machine and get it to create its own boot media

m55 said:

I bought a bigger NVME drive and cloned my existing OS drive onto the new drive. Everything has been working for months so I formatted the old drive. After doing so, I cannot boot into Windows

Click to expand...

Was it a Macrium clone?

Is there an available Macrium backup image?




1) Please perform a startup repair > search for srttrail.txt > post a share link
(Windows\System32\Logfiles\Srt\SrtTrail.txt)






2) Perform a system restore to the oldest system restore point:





3) Please post results:

bootsect /nt60 all
bcdedit
diskpart
lis dis
lis vol
sel dis 0
det dis
lis par
sel par 1
det par
sel par 2
det par
sel par 3
det par
sel par 4
det par
sel dis 1
det dis
lis par
sel par 1
det par
sel par 2
det par
sel par 3
det par
sel par 4
det par

garlin said:

You can try:

Code:

mountvol S: /s
bcdboot C:\Windows /s S: /f UEFI

Click to expand...

Thank you!! This fixed it.

And thank you to everybody else who posted, it is greatly appreciated.

If rebuilding the BCD store doesn't resolve the startup issue, you can export and delete the BCD store using this guide.

After a successful boot repair consider:


1) Enable regback:




2) Run Tuneup plus > post a share link






3) Backup BCD:




4) Create a new restore point




5) Make a new backup image:

When you cloned the original drive, the new drive inherited the old drive's BCD info instead of pointing back to itself. As long as the old drive was around, everything still worked.

You could patiently try recreating the BCD, but a faster way is to use bcdboot since we know from diskpart that you have both a valid C: and 99 MB EFI partition.

mountvol S: /s is a shortcut to mounting the EFI partition, without having to assign a drive letter from diskpart.

garlin said:

... mountvol S: /s is a shortcut to mounting the EFI partition, without having to assign a drive letter from diskpart.

Click to expand...

I see. Thanks, garlin.

Kind regards,

garlin said:

You can try:

Code:

mountvol S: /s
bcdboot C:\Windows /s S: /f UEFI

Click to expand...

Or simply: bcdboot c:\windows

Use the /s and /f options to override the default bcdboot behavior.

bcdboot /?

/s - Specifies an optional volume letter parameter to designate the target system partition where boot environment files are copied. The default is the system partition identified by the firmware.

/f - Used with the /s option, specifies the firmware type of the target system partition. Options for <firmware> are 'UEFI', 'BIOS', or 'ALL'.

Click to expand...

If the /s <volume letter> option is not used, bcdboot automatically determines the system partition based on how the system is currently booted (UEFI or BIOS), whether that is an installed Windows OS or a Windows installation USB flash drive, as reported by the firmware.