10 replies to this topic

[misty]

Some notes on BCD Edit and BCD stores. Many thanks to Wonko, Erwan.l and cdob for their feedback and help.

These notes have been sitting around on my hard drive for weeks - I'm currently locked out of my reboot subdomain awaiting a password reset

They're not much use to anyone else on my hard drive so I've uploaded them here as a temporary measure (or possibly as a mirror to the mistype.reboot.pro subdomain) - http://www.mistyrebo...Edit/index.html

Regards,

Misty

P.s. feedback is welcome.

[Zoso]

hi misty,

wow! this will come in quite handy. specifically for us hobbyists that dont mess with BCDs enough to remember everything the next time we do.

I recall some talk in another thread where y'all were discussing the vista boot floppy image but cant remember the details. it was very interesting! can you refresh my memory about it? I think that was something special in the Vista BCD that none of the later versions had, right? did you cover that in your new guide too?

many thanks, this is great!

[Wonko the Sane]

@misty

Very good.

 

@zoso

Naah, the approach is called "Vista boot floppy" because it was (though exactly the same approach with NTLDR+NTDETECT.COM+BOOT.INI instead of BOOTMGR+\boot\BCD has been used since good ol' NT 4.x times) first time documented here:

http://www.multiboot....uk/floppy.html

there are no functional differences between Vista and later NT OS, the same approach is still possible, though on latest systems (8/8.1) the use of it prevents some features (fake shutdown/sleep or similar) from working "normally", and some additional "tricks" may be needed to have them fuly working, the info is (a bit scattered) in this thread:

http://reboot.pro/to...in-bios-to-gpt/

starting from around here:

http://reboot.pro/to...o-gpt/?p=192523

 

Wonko

[alacran]

@ misty

 

In  Alternatives to BCDEdit you forgot to add the free tool BootIce, it has two way to deal with BCD "Professional mode" and "Easy mode" (realy very easy, it has all the basics and as far as today I haven't needed nothing more)

[erwan.l]

@Misty

 

Impressive work as always.

A must have reference !

 

Regards,

Erwan

[pscEx]

Great work!

Maybe you can add some sentences about RegeditEx, which can "natively" edit BCD files.

 regeditex.gif   16.33KB   2 downloads

Peter

[Wonko the Sane]

Maybe you can add some sentences about RegeditEx, which can "natively" edit BCD files.

regeditex.gif

As a side note, it would be a good idea if you could add to the RegeditEx a "parser/interpreter" for the BCD structure so that both our good Linux and windows oriented friends would have a GUI alternative to BCDedit. 

 

Wonko 

[pscEx]

I sometimes thought about it.

But I did not try, because of lack of knowledge.

 

I nowhere found until now a correlation between GUID and objects.

 

Maybe misty with deeper BCD knowledge can help.

 

Peter

[Wonko the Sane]

I sometimes thought about it.

But I did not try, because of lack of knowledge.

 

I nowhere found until now a correlation between UUID and objects.

 

 

Well, I guess that you could have asked .

 

The idea of the nice guide by Misty was originated here (JFYI):

http://reboot.pro/to...ch-using-linux/

 

But the nice list of objects by Geoff Chapell is online since years:

http://www.geoffchap...cd/elements.htm

This page was created on 21st May 2007 and was last modified on 11th March 2012.

 

 

Wonko

[pscEx]

Thanks, Wonko.

 

I think that the last link will help me.

 

Peter

 

BTW: I'm a bad Finder

[misty]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I'll look at adding the suggestions for alternatives to BCDEdit in the next draft.

@pscEx

...I think that the last link will help me...BTW: I'm a bad Finder

I agree After all, the link to Geoff's site is in my guide!

Regards,

Misty