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Existence of the Boot menu (MBR) denies access to other boot methods.
Hello. I just hit a problem for which I can see no immediate workaround. I'm hoping someone else can.
I had XP on a partition, the primary partition had/has Win7 Home Premium. I tried many ways to delete the XP partition, but no programs, including 7's disk management, would let me do that as it was a system partition, until I tried Paragon, which said OK. After rebooting, my computer failed to boot into 7, though the XP partition had been deleted. What Paragon did to damage the primary partition and my Win7 boot capabilities I don't know, but damage it it did. Had I had access to DOS's FDISK, I would have had no problems as I've done such things many, many times before without a single problem using FDISK.
I had previously used a program (EasyBCD) to successfully remove the XP entry from the boot menu, assuming there might be problems if I left it there. I booted from my Win7 DVD, and chose Repair. The Win7 installation was clearly there - I trawled it looking for some system file that Windows wanted me to find, but didn't name. I never did find anything suitable, because I wasn't told what I was looking for. So I moved away from that bit and on to Repair proper - no input from me. After a very long time, I was told to reboot to apply found solutions. I did so.
At boot, I got a message telling me that the file NTOSKRNL.EXE was missing from the Windows\System32 folder, and I should replace it. Impossible, of course, while I couldn't actually boot; I think I can be forgiven for asking, with some frustrated anger, why a file important for the boot process was missing AFTER that lengthy Repair process? Surely the Windows Repair process should ensure all such important files are where they are needed, particularly as in this case, as the Repair process subsequently stopped me from trying other methods. I'll explain.
The Repair process had recovered the old boot record that offered the boot menu with 7 OR XP, and that proved disastrous. No other choices were offered or available. And so I was completely helpless. The F8 menu that includes the Safe Boot options offered nothing else useful - I needed something to bypass the Boot Menu such as, "Boot Using Other Device" to try other things, such as booting from a boot DVD created with Macrium Reflect which would allow me to write a saved image of my drive. But because the boot menu, and the F8 menu ONLY were available, I was royally snookered - my only choices being to boot into 7 or XP, both of which were both now corrupted, and unbootable.
I have other hard drives, and have now installed XP on one in an attempt to recover that way, having disconnected the "problem" drive from the motherboard. Had I been able to override the frustrating boot menu, I might have saved a lot of time, but neither the boot menu nor the F8 menu offers the ability to boot from another device.
It is important to note that the Windows boot menu takes no notice of the BIOS setup boot order, where I had and have every boot option set to my DVD drive. Once the boot menu is displayed, one can only choose from that, and booting from CD/DVD, or any other device is not possible.
I had hoped to recover my "problem" drive once I got XP installed on this other disk - accessing the "problem" drive via USB adaptor, and copying the missing file to the System32 folder, and trying again to boot. (I have placed quotation marks around the word 'problem' when applied to my drive, as the drive itself wasn't actually the problem. The problem was the Repair process, which effectively denied me any control of the boot process. I could not bypass the boot menu to use other means.)
Anyway... having installed XP on the other drive, and placed the "problem" drive in a USB caddy, I immediately did a search for ntoskrnl.exe, and discovered that it actually IS in the System32 folder after all, despite the Windows boot message that it is not(????). This was not only unexpected, but effectively made further progress impossible. Windows says no, Explorer says yes.
The file also exists in \sysWOW64, and so I thought that maybe the file in \System32 was just corrupt, and tried to delete it prior to copying it back into the \System32 directory from the \sysWOW64 directory. No joy. I could do nothing to the files in the Windows directories despite the fact that I was accessing them from a USB drive which was no part of the current boot configuration. Such control is madness and mightily unhelpful. Protect system files, yes, but note where they are currently being accessed from.
I can do nothing while the boot menu continues to be displayed - I absolutely must delete it in order for me to boot from CD/DVD (or USB). Does anyone know where Windows keeps its boot menu information, so I can delete it? I need to remove the boot menu in order to access the DVD to reinstate the Macrium Reflect image to maintain this installation of Win7.
I can, and probably will have to, wipe and reformat the drive in order to be able to write the Macrium Reflect image, but I would like to keep the (EXISTING - it's all there) Windows 7 installation.
Your suggestions welcomed.
Cheers.
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