Solved Stuck in boot menu

Marie SWE said:

I agree.. if you only do one install every other year with windows or linux only.. i agree a multi installer solution might be a bit overkill.
But it can also be used as a trouble shooting tool with backup functions etc if you use Ventoy on an external SSD instead of a sick

But i agree.. i have never have a boot failure with Rufus or other.. I have not use the Microsoft Creaton Tool thogh.. so i actually dont even know how that one works.

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Here in Greece we mostly use the Greek version of Windows, but some of us prefer the US English version because we are accustomed to. Back in Windows 95 there was a large gap between a new US English release and the respective Greek release. The more advanced users wanted to see the new releases as soon as possible and not wait for months for the Greek release which usually had some incorrect translation and bugs not present on the US English release. Since Windows Vista there were two releases 32-bit and 64-bit and two languages US English and Greek. So as a computer technician I needed four DVDs or USB flash drives for each Windows version or two 32/64 combo, one for each language. So I had two for Windows 7, two for 8.1 and two for Windows 10. Thankfully I discovered Ventoy and I can have all these in one or two USB flash drives.

spapakons said:

Here in Greece we mostly use the Greek version of Windows, but some of us prefer the US English version because we are accustomed to. Back in Windows 95 there was a large gap between a new US English release and the respective Greek release. The more advanced users wanted to see the new releases as soon as possible and not wait for months for the Greek release which usually had some incorrect translation and bugs not present on the US English release. Since Windows Vista there were two releases 32-bit and 64-bit and two languages US English and Greek. So as a computer technician I needed four DVDs or USB flash drives for each Windows version or two 32/64 combo, one for each language. So I had two for Windows 7, two for 8.1 and two for Windows 10. Thankfully I discovered Ventoy and I can have all these in one or two USB flash drives.

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The translation to Swedish have always been good.. its just some wordings i react to sometimes. Back in the win 3.11/95/98 days, i had the luxury of knowing one of those that worked for Microsoft but was stationed here and did the translation.. so i had really easy to complain and it was fast fixed the three times i saw something. But then he quit and started his own IT company. So now i can only complain in this forum if i see something. *LOL*

I only had 6 USB sticks.. and i trashed two of them by writing to them too often.. so I'm really glad for Ventoy as you saw my list above.. its a lot of burning USB's or keep a big tray of USB's laying around *LOL*
I also discovered a neat thing with Ventoy.. if you flash it to a external disk, that disk can be put as an internal disk in a lab-computer.. so you can use the Bios boot menu to reinstall a lab computer ten times a day if needed to test things on bare metal instead of in VM's and as an internal disk, you get really fast installs.

In my Ventoy USB flash drive I have Windows 7, Windows 10, Windows 11 both US English and Greek ISOs and for experimentation I also have Ubuntu, Android-x86, Zorin OS, Sergei Strelec WinPE, Acronis Home Rescue. Not as many as you have, but enough for my needs. Also old UEFI 32-bit devices or old 32-bit BIOS PCs cannot boot with the combo 32/64 ISOs. I need a separate 32-bit only ISO of the Windows version I want to install.

spapakons said:

In my Ventoy USB flash drive I have Windows 7, Windows 10, Windows 11 both US English and Greek ISOs and for experimentation I also have Ubuntu, Android-x86, Zorin OS, Sergei Strelec WinPE, Acronis Home Rescue. Not as many as you have, but enough for my needs. Also old UEFI 32-bit devices or old 32-bit BIOS PCs cannot boot with the combo 32/64 ISOs. I need a separate 32-bit only ISO of the Windows version I want to install.

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That sounds as more like a normal setup
I could remove a lot of ISO's from that list.. but as i have a 1TB external disk and 200GB for ISO files and 800 as transport space.. I have just been lazy not remove those i dont need.
Mint.. only the last one i need as my Mother runs Mint.. LMDE can all be removed.. all PopOS too.. also all windows ISO's except for W7 and 2021 LTSC.. so around 20ish ISO's can be removed that i dont use.
Having disk-space is not always good if you lazy not cleaning out now and then. *LOL*

In Science lesson at school we learned that a gas will expand to take the whole space of a container. In computers no matter how large disk we have we will eventually fill it and complain it is small. I remember my first hard disk was a "huge" 40MB back in MS-DOS days where a game was a couple of 360KB floppy disks! I was thinking "how I am I going to fill that". I had even made a partition for MS-DOS and games and a partition for data. Today 40MB is ridiculously small.

cinetapes said:

I finally got it to work thank u all

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Did you manage to fix the problem by changing the boot order in the BIOS settings, or did you get the Windows installation to work some other way?



There was a similar problem in another thread: Windows would no longer boot after Linux had been removed. In that particular case, it was necessary to rebuild the EFI partition: format the EFI partition (which removed the existing bootloader files), run bcdboot C:\Windows to restore the Windows boot files and create or update the Windows Boot Manager entry in UEFI NVRAM, and then manually delete the stale Linux firmware boot entry in the BIOS settings. Only then did Windows boot normally.

If the EFI partition containing the bootloader is deleted, the corresponding firmware boot entry becomes useless, but it may remain in NVRAM. Some firmware will simply skip the invalid entry, while other firmware may eventually remove it automatically.

Celery said:

Did you manage to fix the problem by changing the boot order in the BIOS settings, or did you get the Windows installation to work some other way?

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There was a similar problem in another thread: Windows would no longer boot after Linux had been removed. In that particular case, it was necessary to rebuild the EFI partition: format the EFI partition (which removed the existing bootloader files), run bcdboot C:\Windows to restore the Windows boot files and create or update the Windows Boot Manager entry in UEFI NVRAM, and then manually delete the stale Linux firmware boot entry in the BIOS settings. Only then did Windows boot normally.

If the EFI partition containing the bootloader is deleted, the corresponding firmware boot entry becomes useless, but it may remain in NVRAM. Some firmware will simply skip the invalid entry, while other firmware may eventually remove it automatically.

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I had a similar issue with an old computer dual booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.0 on the same disk (MBR of course). After several attempts to upgrade Ubuntu, I decided it's not worth the effort and I didn't want to install a newer version of Ubuntu, so I just deleted the Ubuntu and the Swap partitions and expanded the Windows partition to fill the disk. I forgot one small detail... Grub bootloader was reading the boot entries from a file in the Ubuntu partition, so upon restarting I saw the Grub prompt and could not boot into Windows. No panic here, I booted with the Windows 7 USB flash drive, reinstalled the Windows bootloader and I was able to boot into Windows 7 again.

PS: Most UEFI firmware can delete unwanted UEFI boot entries from the Boot Priority menu. If yours doesn't have a delete button, like my Asus P8H61, you can use a little utility called EasyUEFI which can also rename the boot entries to a more friendly name.