Hey guys,
I just got a new Asus G75VW with Windows 7 Ultimate loaded (in place of Home Premium). I do not have an Ultimate disk nor the Home Premium (except for the CD key in the bottom of the laptop). The current Windows was booting by EFI so this was going to be a special solution.
I completely f'd up my Asus G75VW laptop by messing with EasyBCD. In detail, I messed up by using EasyBCD 1.6, since adding a new entry has the ability to choose Generic x86 as the boot type or whatever. I needed this option because lots of hackintosh tutorials used this. Turns out, EasyBCD 1.6 is not supported by Win7. I loaded some defaults with EasyBCD, saved it, and restarted my computer. NOW YOU CAN POUND ME INTO A PANCAKE!!!!!
So when I boot, windows boot manager loads into an error screen that says something is wrong with the BCD. The location was either of the error was either (forgot which displayed first):
/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/BCD
or
/Boot/BCD
So, what are my options? A. Fix the boot for Windows Ultimate. B. Format the drive with Windows Home Premium. I opted for A: So what worked and what didn't?
- When doing a search, I found a lot of people suggest using the Repair disk in the Windows Install DVD. This DID NOT WORK....yet. Something about being EFI bootable will show an incompatibility error no matter which Windows disk I used.
Then I downloaded the Hiren Boot CD 15.2!!!!
- Then I used DiskGenius, which was part of the CD. This may work for some, but it totally f'd up my BCD. Refer to here:
http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/228504-missing-boot-manager-4.html
Using it pretty much just made the whole drive unallocated, although the partitions were still there, but lost.
- Then I used Partition Recovery Wizard, another utility in the CD. I basically used this to find partitions and repair it. It successfully did.
- Now when I restarted the computer, it would say BootMgt is missing.
- So I popped in a Windows 7 disk. At the installation screen, I pressed shift+f10 to go to the command line and I ran all the bootrec commands. It successfully did.This also assigned a drive to the BCD. So you when you run bcdedit in command line, you see "partition=c:" instead of {unknown}
- I believe it still didn't boot then. So now I booted up the Windows 7 Ultimate DVD and hit the repair disk option. Finally!!! It passed the incompatibility error. Now all I did was choose the option to fire up the Startup Recovery.
- When I booted, now there are 2 options for this drive. To boot off the Windows Boot Manager or the drive itself. The boot manager, I believe, boots off the EFI partition. This will obviously create an error since I did not fix this. So if I boot off the hard drive itself, it will FINALLY LOAD INTO WINDOWS! YA!
Conclusion:
I know this was not a clean fix, since I converted from EFI to MBR boot (or is it GPT or MBR boot?). Anyways, I am not a claimed IT, hardware expert either. But I'm just glad this thing is finally working.
