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Repair Windows 7 boot menu on UEFI
I accidentally deleted the Windows 7 boot entry in the Windows Boot Manager. My laptop uses UEFI instead of BIOS. The OS is Windows 7 64bit Home Premium.
Here what I tried and its results:
- Use startup repair: I tried to use Startup Repair from a Windows 7 Installation Disk (actually, a USB). However, it said that the Recovery Options was not compatible. There are many causes as mentioned in Causes of incompatibility and I was able to eliminate these:
- 64-bit Installation Disk: Checked
- Windows 7 installer boot to UEFI: don't know how to check
- CPU and OS architecture are the same: Processor (CPU?) Architecture is AMD64, OS is Windows_NT (don't know if the same or not)
Many suggest to use startup repair but I don't know how to make this work.- Use bootrec following Repair Windows 8 efi bootloader: three commands finished succesfully but I still doesn't see the Windows 7 boot entry in the Windows Boot Manager.
- Use diskpart: open diskpart from the command promt from the Windows 7 installation USB. I was able to see
>>list disk
Disk #### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
Disk 0 Online 698GB 1024KB *
Disk 1 Online 3864MB 1024KB
>>list volume
Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
Volume 0 F DVD-ROM No media
Volume 1 C Data NTFS Partition 138GB Healthy
Volume 2 D Entertain NTFS Partition 393GB Healthy
Volume 3 E Recovery NTFS Partition 25GB Healthy
Volume 4 SYSTEM NTFS Partition 200MB Healthy Hidden
Volume 5 OS NTFS Partition 140GB Healthy Hidden
Volume 6 G WinUSB NTFS Partition 3859MB Healthy
I found that
- My disk is a GPT disk
- The Windows partition (volume 5) is hidden.
I tried to unhide the windows partition using
- active: The selected disk is not a fixed MBR disk. The ACTIVE command can only be used on fixed MBR disks.
- attributes volume clear hidden: Virtual Disk Service error. The object is not found.
This has something to do with the UEFI since my PC doesn't use MBR. I think if I can set the OS partition to active I can boot to Windows. But don't know whether this is correct and how to do it.
This is how i "accidentally" delete the windows 7 boot entry: I use EasyBCD 2.1 to add Ubuntu entry to the boot manager since after installing Ubuntu, I can't boot to Ubuntu. However, it was no use since EasyBCD couldn't identify any boot entry. I tried to add some Ubuntu entries and a Windows 7 entry for testing but still didn't see any of them in EasyBCD (in the Windows boot manager, they all appeared). Later, I realized that EasyBCD 2.1 didn't support EFI but EasyBCD 2.2 beta does. That's why the entries doesn't show up in EasyBCD 2.1. Then, I downloaded EasyBCD 2.2 and deleted the added entries leaving a Windows 7 and a Ubuntu entry. The problem may come from here when I delete the wrong Windows 7 entry.