Windows 7 repair disc: errors seen when booted from USB but not from CD
I'm trying to help a friend remotely with a system recovery, with older version of ATI. One of the things I'm doing is preparing a bootable USB flash drive for him with two ATI bootable recovery media versions, plus tools to check his hardware such as memtest86. In that bootable USB flash drive, I included Windows 7 repair disc which boots in a Grub4Dos environment.
I tested the bootable flash drive on my system first, and found something curious.
1. When I boot into the Windows 7 repair disc, from USB flash drive, it finds errors in my Windows 7 system. (My Win7 system has been, seemingly, working perfectly.) Dialog box said:
System Recovery Options
Windows found problems with your computer's startup options.
Do you want to apply repairs and restart your computer?
"View details" said it would repair bootmgr.
I clicked Repair and Restart.
After that, my Windows installation was unbootable. (Not worried, as I can restore from recent ATI image.)
Under Startup Repair (still when booted from Windows 7 repair disc on USB flash drive) it said:
"no os files found on disk"
Repair action: Partition table repair
Result: Failed. error code = 0x3bc3
Windows 7 repair disc could not repair it, could not even see my system. In System Recovery Options, the list of detected Windows installations was blank. It could not detect my Windows system on my internal HD.
2. I removed the USB flash drive, and booted from hard drive:
Windows failed to start.File \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data.
3. I booted from Windows 7 installation disc, selected repair, it fixed it. System was again bootable.
4. Still curious, I again booted from Windows 7 repair disc, from USB flash drive, and again it found errors but also could not detect my OS in that list.
5. When I booted from Windows 7 repair disc CD (not USB), it did detect my Windows installation, and when I clicked Repair, it scanned and reported:
Startup Repair could not detect a problem.
6.
So, something is clearly different when Windows 7 repair disc is booted/run from a USB flash drive versus from a CD. This has shaken my faith in use of the bootable USB flash drive option for Windows 7 repair disc.
Has anyone seen anything like this, or knows why the Windows 7 repair disc would have such bad behaviour when booted from USB?
Hi Colin:
Thanks for the reply.
I would have thought that it would check all attached drives, looking for a Windows installation. The list of detected Windows installations seems to suggest that it would check multiple locations, otherwise why a list?
Do you have any links that talk about the situation you described? I've been searching, but haven't found anything relevant. I've found articles recommending use of Grub4DOS to create a USB bootable Windows 7 repair disc, but none mention protential problems such as what I encountered.
tuttle:
I've booted my laptop from a USB flash drive containing an ISO of the Windows 7 recovery CD using Grub4DOS, and it worked properly. Have you tried your flash drive on more than one PC to see if the problem is with the one specific PC or is a general problem with all PCs? Since PC BIOS support of USB devices can differ, that would be my first suspicion.
For example, on my laptop, if you boot it from a USB flash drive the BIOS enumerates the flash drive as Disk0 and the internal hard disk as Disk1. Some BIOSes do not enumerate flash drives so they may enumerate the hard disk as Disk0. How the Windows recovery CD deals with this, I don't know. You would think that it would know to search all attached disks for a Windows installation, but how and what it does is something I don't know. From your description in the first post it almost sounds like the recovery CD is searching your flash drive for a Windows installation and not the hard disk.
Hi Mark:
You would think that it would know to search all attached disks for a Windows installation, but how and what it does is something I don't know. From your description in the first post it almost sounds like the recovery CD is searching your flash drive for a Windows installation and not the hard disk.
Possible, although when I let it do the repair it recommended, it clearly altered something on my Windows OS hard drive since it would not boot after that "repair".
As for testing on another computer, I don't have another Win7 computer here. I can boot from the USB flash drive on a WinXP computer, but the Windows 7 repair disk ISO won't fully load because that "CPU is not compatible with 64-bit mode". So, no way to test at the moment.
Hope this isn't too late for you but I came across the same issue when I was creating a rescue USB drive for my college-bound daughter. After going over the grub4dos documentation (diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/Grub4dos.htm), I came across the following in the map command section:
An example of when you might use the map command to change the disk order occurs when booting from a USB device (e.g. flash drive, or external hard drive). As the BIOS settings are changed to boot from the USB bus, the internal hard disk would become (hd1). DOS and Windows 9x will not boot from a non-first hard disk, although Windows NT based systems will theoretically boot from a non-first disk
And the BIOS on my daughter's netbook did indeed do a remapping; (hd0) -> flash drive, (hd1) -> hard drive. So when I booted my Win 7 repair ISO from USB, the tool didn't see bootmgr (and the boot directory et al) on hd0 (AKA the USB drive) and offered to "fix" it. I already had my suspicions that it was offering to repair my USB drive. So I add a map command to swap the drives and, voila, it booted just like a regular recovery/repair CD with the Win 7 installation showing up on the list. And selecting System Recovery showed all the restore points. This is the grub menu entry that worked for me (note that this boots directly - no "press any key to boot from CD" prompt). Also, you might need to play with grub from the command line to see what the hard drive mappings are...
title Windows 7 32-bit Repair Disc
find --set-root /multiboot/ISOS/Win7_32bitRepairDisc.iso
map (hd1) (hd0)
map /multiboot/ISOS/Win7_32bitRepairDisc.iso (hd32)
map --hook
root (hd32)
chainloader /BOOTMGR
FYI, this is a YUMI-based multiboot USB (www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/)