Solved New motherboard; system will not boot; cannot find windows; no BCD

[fuzzled]

Hello,

Installed a new "gigabyte" motherboard and now I cannot boot. On powerup, past the BIOS, gets stuck in a windows boot loop, showing the "Starting Windows" splash for a few seconds and then restarting.

Using the recovery USB that I have, and with much googling, here are the things I have seen and tried.

1. Start up with recovery USB
2. Click "Next"
3. Click "Repair your computer"
.. "Searching for windows installations ..."
4. Popup "Windows found problems with your computer's startup options"
5. Click "Repair and restart"
6. Popup "Failed to save startup options"

I don't see any OS listed in the "System Recovery Options" window

7. Click "Next"
8. Popup "An internal error occurred ... The system cannot find the file specified (0x80070002)"

Went to command prompt :

X:\Sources>diskpart
DISKPART> select disk 0
DISKPART> detail disk
:
:
Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
-------------- --- -------------- ------ --------- -------- --------- ------
Volume 0 D System Rese NTFS Partition 100MB Healthy
Volume 1 C NTFS Partition 232GB Healthy

DISKPART> exit

Odd. I used to only have a single disk, "C". Now I have two, with Windows (and my data) in C, but D has the /Boot dir.

9. d:
D: cd boot
D:\Boot> attrib bcd -h -r -s
File not found - bcd
D:\Boot> bootrec /fixmbr
The operation completed successfully

D:\Boot> bootrec /fixboot
The operation completed successfully

D:\Boot> bootrec /scanos
:
Total identified Windows installations : 1
[1] C:\Windows
The operation completed successfully

D:\Boot> bootrec /rebuildbcd
:
[1] C:\Windows
Add installation to boot list? Yes(Y)..: Y
The requested system device cannot be found.

D:\Boot>bcdedit
The boot configuration data store could not be opened.
The requested system device cannot be found
D:\Boot>


soooo.. what happened!!! And how do I get back to a working windows 7 ?

Please help!

 

[johnhoh]

need to know your exact motherboard model and also your former motherboard model, the one this boot drive used to be on

your bios has a SATA mode field in it. The new board needs to have the same setting there as did the old board (e.g. AHCI, RAID). Something to check.

can you boot to safe mode?

 

[fuzzled]

Hi johnhoh,

The old motherboard is fried, unfortunately, so I cannot get into BIOS to check settings :-(

New motherboard is gigabyte Gigabyte B250M-DS3H. Old one is System Board MS-7145 (Computer tower indicates: Power Spec PC Systems)??

No, I cannot boot into safe mode.

After all the bootrec/diskpart fiddling, I don't get the boot-loop. I now get a message:

Windows Boot Manager

Windows failed to start ... to fix your problem :

1. Insert your installation disk and restart
2. Choose your language and click Next
3. Click Repair your computer

...

File: \Boot\BCD
Status : 0xc000000f
Info: An error ocurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data

 

[fuzzled]

When I click through the repair options, and it says it found problems.. there is a "View Details" link.
When clicked it shows :

Repair details:
The following startup option will be repaired:
Name: {bootmgr}
Identifier : {....}

The following startup option will be added:
Name: Windows 7 Professional N (recovered)
Path: Windows
Windows Device: Partition=C: (238373 MB)

...

A copy of the current boot configuration will be saved as C:\Boot\BCD.Backup.002

When I click "Repair and Restart" I get the message : Failed to save startup options...

 

[johnhoh]

you've gone from a 2005 AMD chipset to a 2017 Intel chipset, which I believe is a record for generation jumping. So its likely that the windows driver for your old disk controller is not liking your new motherboard. To remedy this, I recommend you keep your default bios settings for now (which is probably SATA AHCI), and use Offline Regedit to modify your registry so that the next time windows boots it will load the default AHCI and IDE drive controllers. The below page gives details how to do that, beginning in the Scenario 2 section..

How to replace Motherboard without Reinstalling Windows - wintips.org - Windows Tips How-tos

 

[johnhoh]

If none of that helps, try changing your bios SATA mode to IDE

 

[fuzzled]

Whoa!

I followed the tips in the link and was able to boot up into my existing disk!!

Thank you Johnhoh!!!

After all that bootrec and diskpart fiddling were red herrings. It was drive compatibility problem!

Phew.

Do you think I need to follow up with any more driver installations?

 

[johnhoh]

Whoa!
Do you think I need to follow up with any more driver installations?

First run windows update until you have no more updates available, then check start > run > msinfo32 > enter > components > problem devices to make sure it is blank. If you do need drivers, start with the chipset and usb 3 drivers here:

GA-B250M-DS3H (rev. 1.0) | Motherboard - GIGABYTE


Once you have no problem devices within msinfo32, I recommend running Device Cleanup Tool and removing all non-present devices, as your system is probably full of them from your old motherboard

Tools for Windows

 

[fuzzled]

Right so I need drivers. LAN/USB etc : no network, and not recognizing any USB drives..

On a different PC, I downloaded LAN and USB drivers from gigabyte. How do I transfer this to the target PC, since it will not recognize any USB drive in windows?

I thought I could copy it to the recovery USB, and then boot into recovery, copy from USB to the target hard drive, reboot into windows and find the files there.

But when I copy to the recovery USB, I don't see any of the files in drive X: when in recovery mode.

Any hints?

 

[johnhoh]

How do I transfer this to the target PC, since it will not recognize any USB drive in windows?

Your USB 3.0 ports need the gigabyte intel driver but the USB 2.0 ports should work

https://images10.newegg.com/productimage/13-128-980-Z02.jpg

 

[Ranger4]

Right so I need drivers. LAN/USB etc : no network, and not recognizing any USB drives..

On a different PC, I downloaded LAN and USB drivers from gigabyte. How do I transfer this to the target PC, since it will not recognize any USB drive in windows?

I thought I could copy it to the recovery USB, and then boot into recovery, copy from USB to the target hard drive, reboot into windows and find the files there.

But when I copy to the recovery USB, I don't see any of the files in drive X: when in recovery mode.

Any hints?

The Gigabyte motherboard should have come with a DVD. If you run that there should be a lot of drivers etc. included.

 

[fuzzled]

I tried those ports.

But now I have gone and done something bad :-(

When I get the login screen and enter my password, I get "Uer Profile service failed the login, user profile cannot be loaded"

Ugh.. I have no clue whats going on.

 

[fuzzled]

The Gigabyte motherboard should have come with a DVD. If you run that there should be a lot of drivers etc. included.

I don't have a DVD player :-(

 

[fuzzled]

I tried those ports.

But now I have gone and done something bad :-(

When I get the login screen and enter my password, I get "Uer Profile service failed the login, user profile cannot be loaded"

Ugh.. I have no clue whats going on.

Used safe mode and system restore to get back in.

 

[fuzzled]

Right back to the driver problem.. the USB ports don't seem to recognize the drive.
Tried all ports and two different drives.

 

[johnhoh]

Either the usb drive itself is the issue or the usb port is the issue, so here's a bunch of things to try

- a usb drive that is FAT formatted instead of NTFS
- try the USB drive while in safe mode.
- in safe mode and/or normal mode try start > run devmgmt.msc > click on USB devices, then right click on whatever you see there and select uninstall. After that do start > run > hdwwiz.exe > enter > scan for new devices automatically
- if the above does not work, try a repair install from your win7 usb install drive

try this for the user logon problem

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/947215/you-receive-a-the-user-profile-service-failed-the-logon-error-message

 

[fuzzled]

Just wanted to thank all those who responded and helped me with suggestions.

What I ended up doing to update drives without network, USB or CD support was using an ubuntu bootable USB on the machine. Booted into ubuntu, and copied over the drivers into the windows drive.

Then rebooted back into windows and was able to install the network and USB drivers from C:

System is back up and limping along. Will follow Johnhoh's suggestions to clean out old drivers and do updates.

Thank you!

 

[fuzzled]

Experts.. It's not over yet

Remember I did s system restore to recover from a user profile problem? Well, all my data files (docs, pictures etc) are garbled and unreadable now. File names have a string of random characters followed by .js extension.

Oddly, all system files and data are fine, programs are fine, just the files under the Users/USERNAME directory Re garbled...

Please tell me there is a way to recover my data?

 

[Megahertz07]

As this treat is marked as solved and the title is of another subject, I suggest you to open another treat.