Status: 0xc0000225 boot selection failed; required device inaccessible

Hi everybody,

I am dualbooting Windows 7 Ultimate and Arch Linux (using rEFInd boot manager) on a GPT disk and (unfortuunately) have an UEFI system.

My setup used to work perfectly fine, until I recently updated rEFInd - and following this - deleted a paramount file on my ESP: bootx64.efi.

Obviously, I could not boot any OS anymore, so I tried to restore the bootloader but during this process I killed all my partitions.

Luckily, I could restore them using the tool Testdisk on an Archiso live usb stick. I restored bootx64.efi and wanted to boot Archlinux ... where I was greeted by an error message telling me that the root device rEFInd is looking for is not present. I could fix this by adjusting the PARTUUID in the respective config file and now I am booted to Archlinux. So as it seems, recovering the partitions using Testdisk resulted in changed UUIDs for my partitions.

However, I still can not boot Windows 7 because all I see is this boot error:

Code:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the
cause. To fix the problem:

1. Insert your Windows installation disc and restart your computer.
2. Choose your language settings, and then click "Next".
3. Click "Repair your computer".

If you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator or computer 
manufacturer for assistance.

Status: 0xc0000225

Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

As the recovery of Archlinux above shows, the error will most likely be a mismatching PARTUUID.

Now, I tried to recover the bootloader - or adjust the BCD file to be more precise - but no luck there.
I followed this guide: How To In My PC Software: A-How-To: BCDedit to fix Windows 7 Boot... in order to repair the BCD file.

But at the screen where I should select the OS I want to repair, I just have a blank list, I can not select C: (as it is done in the guide). In a consequence (I assume) I can not start bcdedit.exe and - ultimatively - can not edit BCD settings. I even tried copying a bcdedit.exe from another working system onto the Windows 7 usb stick and start it from there, but no luck aswell. Is there any way how I can start bcdedit and adjust the UUID of my Windows partition (if this is the error after all)?

Any other ideas? Help is very much appreciated :)

Best regards

First off: I solved my problem. If you are interested in reading how, read on:

amazing said:

You are right that you have changed GUIDs for all your partitions. In this case, it is impossible to recover your Windows with the recovery tool.
You need to manually restore the BCD store with bcdedit.exe. The method 2 in this page will let you know how to do this.

Well I tried to follow method 2 from the article Error message when you start Windows 7: "The Windows Boot Configuration Data file is missing required information" as you suggested, but when I wanted to use bcdedit.exe or bootrec.exe to rebuild the BCD I always got an error saying:

Code:

The requested system device cannot be found.

As a consequence even method 3 could not be successfull, as it involves bcdedit and bootrec aswell.

The funny thing however was, that if I did an bootrec /ScanOs it would return:

Code:

Scanning all disks for Windows installations.
Please wait, since this may take a while...
Successfully scanned Windows installations.
Total identified Windows installations: 1
[1]  D:\Windows

So basically it found the Windows partition. But if I tried to write a new BCD (f.e. with bootrec /rebuildbcd) for that OS it failed, although with C: and D: I could access both the EFI system partition and the Windows partition and see all the files on both. And I cannot set partitions active as I am using GPT formatted HDD.

bcdedit - Problem recreating BCD on Windows 7 64bit - The requested system device cannot be found - Super User suggests that this might be due to the wrong USB port, however I can eliminate this possibility now (see below).

The other hint from that post is that one has to explicitely tell bcdedit and bootrec the location for creating the BCD file. I haven't tested that as I saw the tip too late.

What basically did the trick was the ren command to make a backup of BCD to BCD.old. After doing so I gave the automatic recovery from Windows a second chance and it turned out that it could this time resolve the issue (and Windows 7 booted up again). However, Windows RE naturally ****ed up my rEFInd as it writes its backup bootloader to <EFI PARTITION>/boot/EFI/Boot/Bootx64.efi. As I have to store refind_x64.efi as <EFI PARTITION>/boot/EFI/Boot/Bootx64.efi (this is the only way I can load rEFInd properly), rEFInd got overwritten. So I had to get into Arch live system again to overwrite M$' backup bootloader with rEFInd again. and could load both OSs again. M$ bootloader now resides inside <EFI PARTITION>/boot/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/ and is thus found by rEFInd at boot time.

What I still don't get is why I couldn't use the the commands from here: Use Bootrec.exe in the Windows RE to troubleshoot startup issues

As this guide How To Rebuild the BCD in Windows [10 to 20 Minutes] explains all the single steps, this seems exactly like what I need, but still I couldn't make it work. Is this because of the wrong UUID (and thus Windows RE isn't able to talk to the partitions? But why does diskpart then find the partitions and is able to list the files on them)?

Now with the repaired Windows if I start Windows RE from the same USB port it shows me C:\ as the found Windows OS to repair. After choosing this as the correct entry, I could use bcdedit just as mentioned in all the guides. So this is why for my setup the wrong USB port is not the reason why bcdedit and bootrec didn't work. But again the question: Why couldn't I use both before?

Hello

I am facing a similar problem as described here.
Status: 0xc0000225 boot selection failed; required device inaccessible
I used paragon partition software to add my D:/ drive (100 MB Reserved drive) to my C:/ drive (Windows Drive). After merging operation by paragon, when the system restarted it failed to boot up. I tried to repair by using the Windows disk but it is showing this error.
Kindly help me out in getting this sorted as soon as possible. Also i want my data to stay preserved as it is important.
Please elaborate your solution as i am a novice in back-end details of windows 7.