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#1
Messed up BCD, Error 0xc000000f. Unable to '/rebuildBCD'
I have an asus n56vz laptop that is a couple years old. I replaced the HDD with a SSD when I bought it and put a clean win7 install on it. Today, I decided to swap the blu-ray drive with a HDD caddy and put the original HDD back in. I think my mistake started because I never wiped the original disc.
So on first boot, Windows wouldn't load. It just hung on the black screen with the windows logo. I tried to boot again and it gave checkdisk warnings which I skipped. I was able to get to my desktop but when I went to open my computer everything went black. I then removed the new drive from the caddy slot and rebooted and went into windows repair. The automated repair checker found a problem with the boot info and proposed a change. I tried to accept it but got an error saying "Failed to save startup options."
At this point, I did some googling and (maybe) incorrectly assumed my registry had been screwed up because the system tried to boot of the original drive instead of the SSD. I tried to restore the registry hive files manually in the repair command prompt tool. I backed up the hive files in /system32/config and copied the ones in from /system32/config/regback.
This is where it went really sour. On boot, I got the exact 0xc000000f error mentioned here. (\EFI\MICROSOFT\BOOT\BCD)
I was able to get into recovery using a usb key but I received an error within the recovery tool when I click repair says "This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible with the version of Windows you are trying to repair". I think this is because of UEFI because I'm sure it was the right version and 64bit. I've tried this with a dedicated repair ISO and a full win7 home premium iso, both on USB.
I was still able to get into the command prompt in RE using shift+f10. First, I reversed the changes I made the registry by copying the backups back into /system32/config. Next, I tried the following commands:
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildBCD --> errored out with "the requested device cannot be found". Some googling around told me this is might be because Windows RE doesn't work 100% when using a usb-key on a usb3.0 port. See this link for info on usb3.0 issue. Unfortunately the laptop does not have any usb2.0 ports...
I also ran DISKPART from the cmd line. It showed the SSD drive with three partitions. 100mb, 124mb, and ~240gb. None of the partitions were marked "active".
Okay so let's try a DVD and /rebuildBCD again. I reinstalled the original Blu-ray drive. Then I burned a full Win7 Home Prem 64bit install disc. I can't get the machine to boot from the disc! I've tried many combinations in the bios with no success. Every time I boot from the disc it just errors and says something like: insert bootable media or chose another boot device. I also tried a dedicated Win7 repair ISO burned to DVD and had the same problem. Arg.... it's possible the Blu-ray drive isn't working properly.
I have no idea what to do now. I consider myself decent at troubleshooting but I think I might be causing myself more harm than good by googling and trial-and-erroring.
Is there any alternative way to run the /rebuildBCD command outside of windows RE? Maybe a 3rd party bootable usb?