no safe boot, no os listed

My system had an odd problem that took me a while to track down, so I'm posting it here.

I need to boot in to safe mode, but when I did msconfig, boot tab, no os was listed and I couldn't click safe boot (or any tick box for that matter). Likewise in Control Panel -> System and Security -> System -> Advanced System Settings, Start and Recovery, there was no default os. I tried opening cmd and running bcdedit /enum, that didn't work either, said no file. Eventually booted win7 cd to get into win7re cmd prompt and tried again with bootrec /RebuildBcd, found 0 operating systems, same with /ScanOS.

The cause of the problem is installing win7 on a bare drive. There is a 100MB reserved drive created and this is the active drive and has c:\boot directory. I went into control panel, disk management and gave this 100mB drive a letter so I could access it. Then I copied the \boot directory to c:\ plus boot.bcd* files, bootmgr and EUMONBMP.SYS (just to be sure). I then made c: the active drive and straight away msconfig boot tab has the os and tickable boxes, etc..

For what I read this might also be the solution for my hibernate problem too, but that's something to try another day.

OMG, YOU are a gentleman and a Scholar. This has been driving me nuts for soooooo long. Not so much the safe boot issue as I just noticed that as I don't go there often.

It was however also the fix to the fact that for about 5-mos now I have not been able to hibernate. I was putting off and putting off reinstalling my OS as I figured there must be a fix for it. Well folks.... This IS it!!!

I think this happened in one of the Updates. I had reinstalled my OS a month or so prior to the hibernate going out. Hibernate did work for quite sometime but went out suddenly one day. Maybe it was in conjunction with the Service Pack 1 release. I'm not sure as I didn't notice the hibernate issue fast enough to connect it to a specific event. I do recall that during the time the hibernate wouldn't work that I was also not able to use system restore to get me back to a time it had worked. Maybe this lack of default OS was the culprit all the time.

Is the system reserve anything to do with my Hybrid drive? I think the 100MB is the size of the SSD portion of the drive. If so then I think it is caused by OS install not on a new drive but on a hybrid drive and the fact that somehow it chooses to put the boot file on that hidden portion of the drive.

At any rate no matter what the cause I owe you a small portion of my sanity which can now be restored.....

I should have update this as I now have working hibernate too so I think this was the fix. I do still have issues with using HDMI as OS tends to come out of hibernate in VGA mode sometimes. Work around for that is set the display to duplicate to both VGA and HDMI.

Sleep is still a problem in that windows tends to resize trayed or minimized windows to fit 1024x768 (I have 1920x1080 screen). I did try setting the default screen size to my screen size but that wasn't totally successful. I think it helped but not 100% fix so I just use hibernate now. As hibernate takes longer to start and you have login it doesn't seem to have the issues that sleeping the display has.

I'm glad my post helped someone, pay back for when posts have helped me.

I think the fix may have been in merely allowing the system reserve to be assigned a letter. I think the step of copying to the c-drive was irrelevant. As soon as I hid the system reserve again it also lost the OS in the boot list. I believe this is indeed linked to use of a hybrid drive which the system reserve must be the SSD. When full windows boots it looses the boot file if you don't have a drive letter assigned.

I had removed the default letter in an attempt to clean up my computer window and not show so many drives. We have a large number of Network drives that are used at my office so it was becoming quite cluttered. My suggestion to resolve this is to assign the drive the letter A and then to use WinBubbles to hide that drive from view. I have done this for my PageFile partition as well as Windows requires the PageFile drive to have a letter assigned. Obviously I don't have occasion to access these drives directly. They are both for system use only.

Without your answer above I don't know how I would have worked out this as the culprit of the issue. Who'd have thunk that cleaning up your visible drives would have an effect on your ability to hibernate and to start up in safe mode. Would not have ever occurred to me.

With regard to your vga issue have you tried to load in an updated version of your ATI/AMD control center? I don't recall the specific issues I was having with my HDMI monitor and notebook screens but after I updated to AMD Vision Engine Control Center for AMD Radeon chipset it seems to have resolved those issues as well.

Before my hibernate crapped out I have exclusively used that mode. Up until then I never used sleep. Sleep yes is quicker to get in and out of but it also doesn't preserve the data in case it crashes and it also uses more power. My assumption would have to be that more power usage also equates to keeping your computer hotter and thus over time the use of hibernate would theoretically prolong the life of your system. Don't know if that is real or not or if there is substantial difference in the two but at least it helps me sleep better at night. LOL!! And any little bit we can do to reduce the carbon footprint and utility bills is always good.

Yes I have the latest ATI/AMD driver. I did get an improvement with one upgrade but again not 100% fix (it used to be all windows resized). The only use for sleep I have is to sleep the display. Instead I now just have a blank screen saver. I guess it will be fixed some update so I'll have to keep retrying it.

try to make sure you have the newest driver running your VGA. I have found that my Win7 will not always choose the new driver when you install that driver. If you go to device manager>display adapter>right click>update driver software. Do not do automatic instead browse and then say let me pick from the list of devices. In the compatible list make sure you are using the most recently dated version of the Graphics driver.

I have had some instances where I have looked (for instance right now when getting you the instructions) and it is using a 7/2009 version vs the 5/2011 version of my ATI Radeon HD Graphics. For some unknown reason windows chooses only based on whether it is compatible. It does not necessarily choose to use the most up-to-date version. My guess is also that it give deference to the Microsoft Corp version which may not be as new as the manufacturer release version. Using the manufacturers most updated version might help the issue you are describing.

I should have said I've been to ati/amd and download direct from there. I'm running AMD catalyst 11.7 and it daily checks for updates. The motherboard is Asus but the drive they supply is older. In fact that had the problem sleep and every window is resized which is why I then checked out AMD/ATI for a later driver.

MrCraigly said:

I think the fix may have been in merely allowing the system reserve to be assigned a letter. I think the step of copying to the c-drive was irrelevant.

I don't think so. Yes making the system reserved visible with a drive letter could be a fix. What I wanted to do was to make C: the real boot drive. Before the fix the reserved drive was the active one that was booted from, then it swapped to C: to finish the boot. I moved those files, made C: active (and thus reserved inactive). Booting now just uses C:.

Is your hard drive a hybrid? That is what I have put in mine. To my understanding of how the hybrid works is, there is a sector at the beginning that is a the SSD (Solid State) portion of the drive. That part of the drive operates more quickly and the drive uses it to speed up reading and writing. I would assume that having the boot sector on that portion would also speed up your boot process. Assuming that is the case then by moving to the portion the system assigned as C might actually be slowing you down.

I know my systems seems less sluggish since I allowed the OS to see that reserve. As I have a Hybrid SSD, combined with 8GB Ram and 2-12GB (24GB total) virtual memory assigned in sectors at the beginning of each of my 2 drives; I had expected my system should fly. It wasn't really doing that with the system reserve hidden. It seems to be now.