For Step by Step Commands check out the article on christitus.com www.christitus.com/repair-windows-boot-partition/ Check out the Complete Windows Tips and Tricks Playlist: ruclips.net/p/PLc7fktTRMBox4cnUiShLPKg_-em5MJNP1
My PC is totally missing the system reserved partition and the type for the two available partitions is Dynamic Data. How do I create the system reserved partition? Thanks.
Thank you sooo muck Chris!! Your video guided me to successfully repair my PC. You’re absolutely right: the other widely touted way for MBR repairs didn’t work for me for my current case although it’d work other times for less severe issues. BTW, my odyssey has been quite painful and interesting. I had a dual boot: Win 8.1 with Linux Mint 19.3. While I was fooling around in Linux to create an ext4 partition using Gparted out of the free space, I gingerly and stupidly got the type of my disk changed to Dynamic from what it was as Basic and the dual boot capability was lost. I soon learned that Dynamic disk type doesn’t support dual boot. And then to turn the disk type back to Basic I learned the entire disk will have to lose data and be formatted. I came across AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional Edition that says it’d change disk type without formatting and losing data but I didn’t want to spend money to buy it at this time when I’m not earning. So I had to back up my data including both Windows and Linux partitions. I then deleted all partitions using another computer, created partitions including 350 MB for System Partition. The reason I didn’t want simply backup and restore partitions is I suspected that process would also maintain the fact that the partition type remains Dynamic so I opted to do an ordinary copying of contents to their destination which wasn’t fun at all. Many times it would fail, even xcopy command with up to 8 switches (E, V, Q, G, H, R (once), Y and B) wouldn’t help. I’d modify NTFS permissions to allow me full control and ownership of folders and files in Windows folder. However, I wasn’t able to copy the Linux partition contents from my back up image (with file extension “mrimg”) created using Macrium Reflect. I was unable to mount the image file to a drive letter which is required to access its contents using Windows Explorer. Macrium would give me an error message, “Failed to load the volume access driver with result 0x800703ed... The volume does not contain a recognized file system. (funny how it was able to back it up originally but now when I need to restore it Macrium whines it doesn’t recognize it 🤣)”. I may be wrong but I’m afraid no other tool can access the backup image created by Macrium. Therefore, what’s your opinion, is there a way to access the backup image of Linux’s ext4 file system partition created by Macrium? Thanks for any ideas.
Almost 3 years later and this video is the gift that keeps on giving! Just managed to save a windows installation from a failing drive by shrinking its partition, clonezilla-ing it onto a vm and repairing the boot sector. Thanks for yet another super helpful video, Chris (:
I can't express how grateful I am! I tried several videos (more than 20), none of which worked! This is the solution for those who deleted the partition reserved for the system! Thanks again, Chris Titus Tech! You won a subscriber!
Mr. Chris, based on your tutorial about repairing the boot in Windows, I just want to express my appreciation for your explanation. It worked perfect! I could resucite my HP pavilion dv6 3000 xc585 model with window 7, upgraded to Windows 10, from a crashed situation a week ago. I was just in the way to format everything in the disk and I found your video tutorial. I followed your instructions and my system came into live again! Thanks. I will recommend your tutorial videos to some other people. Thanks. I gave you a LIKE thumb too.
CHRIS, Woooow, you are THE man!! Thank you so much, I spent a dozen+ hours trying the usual bootrec etc. commands off the USB WIN recovery that all the other sites on the interweb showed, to no avail. I followed your steps, and it worked ...I never considered reformatting the System partition and starting from scratch then, never been in this particular situation before (Win11 dual boot with Ubuntu 24.x, using hibernate all the time, etc ..) and for some reason a week ago for no known reason was not able to boot into Windows any longer. My hat is off to you, I THANK YOU!
For anyone who doesn't know - MBR has 2 partitions, EUFI has 3 partitions. This is a great tutorial for MBR. Now, if only you can show me how to get a VM in VirtualBox be GPT so when I try and clone a master image it works on EUFI ;(. Great tutorial.
In my case when running "/fixboot" it said "access denied". But in the end, I followed all the steps and it worked despite that answer. A big thanks to you for sharing your knowledge.
Dude thank you so much! I cried when this happened as i had so much important data on there, but you saved my life! I cannot fully express how happy i am right now. Thank you!
Waited over a month without installing windows after it got corrupted, and searched a solution all over the web but could not find. But RUclips algorithm came through and found this video. Thank you man from the bottom of my heart.
You saved me from my own boneheaded mistake. No need to go into how I got there, but my system reserved was gone. I followed you the whole way, stopping frequently since you moved fast, but when I got to bootrec /fixboot I got an access denied message. Oh no, I'm still screwed but I went ahead and did the last command bootrec /rebuildbcd and restarted. The feeling of relief when I saw my desktop was most excellent. It still worked even though the fixboot command was denied. Thanks again T, I'll definitely return if I ever have another problem I need help with. I'm book marking this video so I won't forget how to find you.
You are a lifesaver. What happened to me is I removed my HDD to be used by my other PC and formatted it. When I boot my first PC it just wont boot anymore. All the guides i found in the internet are all useless. Only yours worked. Thank you very much.
I have been struggling with trying to fix the bootloader issue on this Win7 machine for days, and you have just saved the day. Thank you so much for the video with clear steps.
My god, you're a lifesaver, man. I was dicking around in my BiOS and changed something I shouldn't have, but you saved me from having to reformat my entire system and lose all of my Lightroom catalogs I had just gotten through organizing.
Hey Chris, Absolutely brilliant! I had a win 10 drive (from our accounting dept!)I was for sure was corrupt after cloning to M2, but I tried this and it fixed it and booted up no problem! You are a god among us. Cheers from Jerome here in Ontario.
I just wanna say, thanks. coz I followed a lot of guides and they didn't have a lot of info or didn't go into depth enough and care to explain. from now on, I see a ctt guide I shall follow. you know what you're talking about and you know what you're doing, unlike the other guides...
I just used your directions to fix a Windows 10 system that I cloned. Windows will recognize two disks with the same signature. Using the 'uniqueid' in partdisk can be used to change the signature, but it can also make the drive not bootable. Using your turorial, I was able to get Windows to boot properly again. Thanks for the directions!
Thanks for your assistance. My PC would not boot after I accidentally deleted my boot partition. Your directions were right on the money. PC rebooted after I followed your instructions.
Hey Chris, was getting this error "An operating system wasn’t found. Try disconnecting any drives that don’t contain an operating system" for two days, tried everything, was getting really frustrated worried about losing my data but your step by step process corrected the boot issue and fixed the problem in one go. Blessings bro, Thanks!!! 5 Star Ratings*****
Thank you so much, Chris. It worked for me on non-server, regular Windows10 ! Please note two weird points of interest : 1) I had to use caps for SELECT DISK command for it to work so then used caps throughout after that. 2) command BOOTREC FIXBOOT still access denied ( ! ) [BOOTREC /FIXMBR and BOOTREC /REBUILDBCD still worked and everything else too] . I got a clean boot to windows ! You're a star ! Live long and prosper, Sir.
After days of searching, reading, watching and testing I get your video in my feed and allthough I havent tried it yet, I'm still impressed (and a bit frustrated) that you explained and showed more steps to the process than ANY of all the things I've found! I got a good feeling about my next attempt at repairing my system =D
Hey Chris, I accidentally screwed up my efi partition yesterday, been really worried the whole night, tried 10 different fixes to no yield, luckily I got this video’s link in some google search, problem solved. Thanks a ton👍 Subscriber for life.
Amazing, brilliant, you saved my PC. I deleted my EFI partition while in my Linux OS in a differet partition, then could not boot even from any bootable USB pen, then after a lot of messing around with the BIOS and using your video instructions to rebuilt the boot loader EFI partition, all good, phew, what a relief, thank you so much.
I love you! I gotta add something: if you're using a USB drive with Windows and after "bootrec /rebuildbcd" you get "The requested system device cannot be found" error - make sure to try 2.0 usb ports. I turned off the PC, switched to usb 2.0 port and it worked like charm
I TRIED *EVERYTHING AND ONLY YOURS WORKED!* THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! Everyone was always doing the same thing with those last commands but _IT NEVER WORKED!_ Thank you for teaching me how to format the exiting boot and create a new one! Bless you!!!!
Thank you so much, Sir, for such clear-cut instructions as opposed to other postings! This really rescued my Windows partition after I mis-wrote the Boot Loader while installing Ubuntu 21.04 in my dual-boot setup! As someone said in the comments below, this video deserves for that like button to be really jammed on! Thanks once again!!
EXCELLENT EXCELLENT!! Nothing else worked. Did start up change in msconifg, got blue screen of death, would not system restore, would not rest / save files. Tried many routes, this was the one that ONLY WORKED. He talks fast, write it down and double check the commands in command prompt (admin).
Thank the Lord and you, my friend. I had followed all those other articles and videos you spoke of and I was still having trouble booting windows. Your video filled in the blanks, so to speak.
Thank god. Thank you times a million. Been trying for two days after I was trying to install a second OS and formatted the System reserved partition by accident and your method was the key to my solution and the resolve to my detriment. Thank you so much holy...
Thank you! It didn't work exactly as it should for me as I will explain, but I managed to boot back into Windows with your help. Now I'll explain a few things that might help others. Firstly, my drive is GPT not MBR which gave me doubts about following this guide as I researched and found that bootrec /fixmbr does not work on GPT as the name might indicate. I ran it anyway expecting an error but it did actually run, whether it did anything or not, I don't know. But you *may still be able to use this guide to fix your problem even if you have a GPT drive.* Ok so here's my problem: I installed Pop_OS and this broke my Windows 11 boot loader. I inspected further and found that my issue was different to most as when I checked in diskpart I found that my EFI partition was simply and completely missing, so I ended up shrinking my windows partition and creating a new system partition altogether (easy to find guides for this part). I actually followed a guide for this that sent me down a weird path, which I didn't realise at the time. I was instructed to shrink my C drive by 500mb and then create a 200mb partition for EFI, and a 128mb partition for something else which ended up not being necessary. All I would recommend is to 1) shrink C partition by 500mb, and create your EFI from that, from this point on you can run all the commands from this video. The only difference is my EFI partition is now 200mb, but this doesn't seem to be an issue. Next it's worth noting that cmd kept reporting that it was finding 0 Windows installations on any of my drives/partitions, as is the case in the video, only I'm not running a VM. Despite this, I continued to run the various commands, and eventually when I rebooted and hit F12, the Windows Boot Manager had reappeared in my boot list! To be honest I'm not 100% sure what part of the process fixed my Windows EFI, as I took elements from various tutorials and partly just used common sense and troubleshooting to figure out what I should do next based on what I had already done, but the upshot is I managed to recover from simply not having an EFI partition despite not finding the exact guide for my exact issue. My best piece of advice would be this: *periodically reboot your machine between steps!*. If you get into cmd through your Windows installer USB and you start running commands, don't be afraid to exit out and see if anything has changed in between time. You may not realise that your issue isn't exactly the same as the one in the guide your following, and you may not need to follow each and every step. I rebooted especially after running some bootrec/fix/rebuild commands, if you run a command and it looks like it has successfully completed, just check if that has resolved the issue prior to running more scary commands. Oh, also I nearly forgot, but the bootrec /fixboot command didn't actually work for me, I was greeted with an "Access Denied" error when trying to run it, but, clearly that didn't matter as I fixed the issue without that command. (I read that different Windows build installers may deny this command where other builds may authorise it). The main upshot of this comment is that if you are struggling, you may be better off saving time, and instead of trying to find a tutorial for your exact issue, maybe corroborate elements from different tutorials, and apply some logic to your troubleshooting. What helped most for me was learning a) how to create a new system partition through diskpart, and b) learning all the commands in this video/other guides. The rest was just proceeding with caution, periodically rebooting, and being able to adapt when I couldn't follow a step exactly in a tutorial. Hope some of this helps others as it was pretty frustrating for me reading so many comments saying "Thank you so much this saved my life!" when this absolutely wasn't the case for me.. Just persevere and you'll get there! Thanks for the guide, it did help me out a lot even if my issue was a bit more complicated... xD
Thank you sooooooo much dude!!! You saved my dual boot with Ubuntu. Windows 10 to 11 update messed up the boot files and this was the only solution that worked. THANKS
1:52 for me it says: Virtual Disk Service error: This operation is not allowed on an invalid disk. The disk may be invalid because it is corrupted or failing, or it may be invalid because it is OFFLINE. What should I do?
thanks it worked for me. i was about to reinstall windows before i do that i just searched for a solution and got your video. now my lap is booting perfectly. thank you so much.
Thank you! I watched this and your related videos and gained a much better understanding of what these partitions are about. Watch several because you NEED to understand everything before you start wiping out partitions. In my case the disk had a long history: started with Windows 7 over ten years ago, upgraded to Windows 10, cloned, then moved to a different machine. So the disk had 4 partitions: 1 = boot, 2 = Old Windows 7 boot (I believe), 3 = Actual Windows 10 partition, and 4 = God knows what. So following your instructions was great for being confident the boot partition was good. But it still wouldn't boot. So I figured partition 2 was causing the problem because it was not the Windows partition. Deleted partition 2 and it boots now! Check and re-check before deleting a partition though. I was only comfortable doing it because I had 2 full backups.
Damn man, 5 years later and you saved all my data from my primary disk, not sure why the boot partition got deleted or erased, anyways thank you so much bro
Thanks for doing this video. It helped me to restart my windows 10 pro and saved me from reinstalling windows 10 and reloading all my programs and files.
oh my fucking god, after the struggle of not setting up my linux install correctly and after the pain of dealing with partitions and reading through forums, your video came up as a salvation. Thank you, really!! Really good tutorial
Thank you very much for this video, had to shrink the main drive and recreate the 500mb efi partition first since my Windows installation had put the boot partition in my old HDD that I formatted causing an error that says "Reboot and Select proper Boot device" every time I try to boot my pc. After recreating the partition, I followed every step that you said in this video and my PC is booting normally again. :)
Hey thanks for this tutorial! Works for windows 11. For some reason when I reformatted my second drive it had the boot files on it, so this video was a massive help. I had to do a couple extra steps (creating new system partition), but couldn’t have done it without the video. Thanks!
How did you change the location of the boot partition ? I want to move windows onto another SSD I have so it has its sole drive to work on , problem is the boot partition is on my HDD/SSD hybrid , how would I go about changing the location like you did ?
Shailesh Aanand - You can do it with "create partition efi" instead of "create partition primary", then "format fs=fat32". You can then follow the rest of the instructions in the video. This article shows you how to shrink the primary windows partition to make room for the EFI partition, you can also use EaseUS (free version) to do the resizing. www.ubackup.com/windows-10/restore-efi-partition-windows-10-8523.html
you are a god! first video / tutorial which fixed my problem. every other solution just failed and i just thought why u don''t make a copy of a clean EFI partition and create it then on windows (i am new to linux and i didn't know how i could do this in gparted or cli). youre gonna be the first person, i support on patreon!
Great video Chris, but I get "access is denied" when doing the fixboot and "target device not found" when doing rebuildbcd. Do you have a video that explains how the Windows boot partition works and how the database works?
It's been a LONG time since I've used Windows (over ten years) so I'm surprised to see how much you can actually achieve from what looks like a normal old DOS prompt these days. In the old days if something went seriously wrong like that, your only resort was third party tools or, more often, a complete reinstall.
Worked great! had some issues the first time I tried it on WIndows 11 showing "C:" was not available so cleaned up partitions with windows disk manager in another computer to leave less partitions, I also updated to the latest BIOS for my motherboard and finally I was able to assign letter C: in another drive, followed all the instructions to the "T" and saved my new computer can't thank Chris enough.
When I do the /rebuildbcd thing, it asks my if I watnt to add the installation to the boot list. When I say Y, it says 'cannot find requested system device'. When I say A (All), the same.
In my case it still said "identified Windows installations: 0" but when i did a reboot, it started Windows as expected. Thanks for the tutorial. 👍 Now I need to find out what happened to the system-reserved partition in the first place.
Followed the steps outlined applied to two machines driving me nuts and in both instances following other methods but yours worked completely, restoring booting into the desktop and OS. Thank you so much!
Thank you so much for this video it helped me out a lot. No one really goes into detail on how to format the partition. Because of this video I was finally able to make my drive bootable. Thank you.
Excellent solutions and worked for me on 2 pc. It saves lot of time without reinstalling OS. Great help and appreciate your effort for making this video. Thanks again
Hi Chris, this was excellent. Only one thing was that I got an element not found error when I was at the bootrec /fixboot part. I resolved this by setting the System Reserved partition as active and re running the command. thanks.
How did you make it active? I tried to run on disk part the command active for the selected system reserve partition but it says that it can only be used on fixed MBR disks
@@barret1n Hi friend, It's two years now, but I am pretty sure that I would have used the active command on the partition in DiskPart. A lot of times when running these bootrec bootfix type commands I have found that there is a bit of trial and error and they rarely follow the exact path of the instructions. Good Luck.
Man this saved my butt after cloning my old SSD to a new M.2 SSD. My Windows didn’t wanna boot up and kept giving me the blue screen. I was getting really desperate. Thank you so much 🙏🏻🙏🏻
apparently I need more help! I can walk through all the steps, but I get to the end where we bootrec /rebuildbcd and it scans the drive... It says it was successful but at 5:02 you mention it should show my partition. It does not, it says "0" just as yours does. before those last few steps i can do the /Scanos on the drive and partition and it shows all my windows files on that drive. SO, what am I missing? why do i get to the end and nothing is really there and it still won't boot?
I just noticed in my BIOS, now i have TWO boot drives, exactly the same hard drive, but its recognizing two boot files. I switched which one would boot first, and still neither work. ugh.
I completed all the steps but I couldn’t complete the last step. It gave me an error system device not found. Because of that I browsed through all over the internet. But after several youtube videos and tutorials I just figured out that it just only need “bcdboot c:\windows” this command phase to be completed. After figuring that out I just restarted my pc and then voila 😭 Pc turned on perfectly. FYI : I accidentally deleted whole my system reserved partition and following these steps really helped me out. So I’m here to tell you, even if your “rebuildbcd” command gave you an error, try to reboot and see if your system boots, because even though just only that command failed to execute, My system got booted. So I think this will help someone.
same here. Now my hard drive appears twice in the UEFI (the first time with the name of the harddrive and thw second with the windows boot manager prefix). It won't directly from the hardrive bit it does froom the boot manager. idgaf it works!
It worked.. although the fix mbr says access denied, when i reboot the unit to it's bios.. the boot manager appeared (which is missing in my case) and boot into it then i worked.. a big thank you.. you saved me from formatting the entire drive and reinstall windows and everything haha.
I'd be trying in vain to fix my "system reserved" partition after a bodged "shrink" operation. I always got partway to a solution with tools like Macrium Reflect, EaseUS / MiniTool partition wizards -- BUT nothing I tried would complete the last piece of the puzzle which is doing a clean format of the boot partition as you've described. Nice work, and thanks!
![Repairing Windows Boot Partition and Boot Files | [Resolved] bootrec fixboot access denied](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/WC4lDgpud1Y/mqdefault.jpg)
For Step by Step Commands check out the article on christitus.com
www.christitus.com/repair-windows-boot-partition/
Check out the Complete Windows Tips and Tricks Playlist: ruclips.net/p/PLc7fktTRMBox4cnUiShLPKg_-em5MJNP1
Chris, will the same proceedure work for Win7pro64 too?
My PC is totally missing the system reserved partition and the type for the two available partitions is Dynamic Data. How do I create the system reserved partition? Thanks.
Thank you sooo muck Chris!! Your video guided me to successfully repair my PC. You’re absolutely right: the other widely touted way for MBR repairs didn’t work for me for my current case although it’d work other times for less severe issues.
BTW, my odyssey has been quite painful and interesting. I had a dual boot: Win 8.1 with Linux Mint 19.3. While I was fooling around in Linux to create an ext4 partition using Gparted out of the free space, I gingerly and stupidly got the type of my disk changed to Dynamic from what it was as Basic and the dual boot capability was lost. I soon learned that Dynamic disk type doesn’t support dual boot. And then to turn the disk type back to Basic I learned the entire disk will have to lose data and be formatted. I came across AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional Edition that says it’d change disk type without formatting and losing data but I didn’t want to spend money to buy it at this time when I’m not earning. So I had to back up my data including both Windows and Linux partitions. I then deleted all partitions using another computer, created partitions including 350 MB for System Partition.
The reason I didn’t want simply backup and restore partitions is I suspected that process would also maintain the fact that the partition type remains Dynamic so I opted to do an ordinary copying of contents to their destination which wasn’t fun at all. Many times it would fail, even xcopy command with up to 8 switches (E, V, Q, G, H, R (once), Y and B) wouldn’t help. I’d modify NTFS permissions to allow me full control and ownership of folders and files in Windows folder.
However, I wasn’t able to copy the Linux partition contents from my back up image (with file extension “mrimg”) created using Macrium Reflect. I was unable to mount the image file to a drive letter which is required to access its contents using Windows Explorer. Macrium would give me an error message, “Failed to load the volume access driver with result 0x800703ed... The volume does not contain a recognized file system. (funny how it was able to back it up originally but now when I need to restore it Macrium whines it doesn’t recognize it 🤣)”. I may be wrong but I’m afraid no other tool can access the backup image created by Macrium.
Therefore, what’s your opinion, is there a way to access the backup image of Linux’s ext4 file system partition created by Macrium? Thanks for any ideas.
Bootrec fixboot access is denied
bootrec /fixboot shows access is denied
This is the first ALL-INCLUSIVE commands typed (with specificity!) video or FAQ I have seen after 4 days of struggling with my partitions. BLESS YOU!
Almost 3 years later and this video is the gift that keeps on giving! Just managed to save a windows installation from a failing drive by shrinking its partition, clonezilla-ing it onto a vm and repairing the boot sector. Thanks for yet another super helpful video, Chris (:
I can't express how grateful I am! I tried several videos (more than 20), none of which worked! This is the solution for those who deleted the partition reserved for the system! Thanks again, Chris Titus Tech! You won a subscriber!
Was there any kind of data loss/format, or just a 100% working repair?
@@DjSparkbeat no data loss here!
4 years later and you still saved my life!! THANK YOU!
Mr. Chris, based on your tutorial about repairing the boot in Windows, I just want to express my appreciation for your explanation. It worked perfect! I could resucite my HP pavilion dv6 3000 xc585 model with window 7, upgraded to Windows 10, from a crashed situation a week ago. I was just in the way to format everything in the disk and I found your video tutorial. I followed your instructions and my system came into live again! Thanks. I will recommend your tutorial videos to some other people. Thanks. I gave you a LIKE thumb too.
Been Working on a fix all day and none have worked except for yours. We need more people like you in the YT community. Thank you.
CHRIS, Woooow, you are THE man!! Thank you so much, I spent a dozen+ hours trying the usual bootrec etc. commands off the USB WIN recovery that all the other sites on the interweb showed, to no avail. I followed your steps, and it worked ...I never considered reformatting the System partition and starting from scratch then, never been in this particular situation before (Win11 dual boot with Ubuntu 24.x, using hibernate all the time, etc ..) and for some reason a week ago for no known reason was not able to boot into Windows any longer. My hat is off to you, I THANK YOU!
For anyone who doesn't know - MBR has 2 partitions, EUFI has 3 partitions. This is a great tutorial for MBR. Now, if only you can show me how to get a VM in VirtualBox be GPT so when I try and clone a master image it works on EUFI ;(. Great tutorial.
In my case when running "/fixboot" it said "access denied". But in the end, I followed all the steps and it worked despite that answer.
A big thanks to you for sharing your knowledge.
Yes in another registry edit video he comment that it sometimes says access denied but usually doesn’t affect the end fix.
Same here it showed access denied but it worked 🎉🎉🎉
Dude thank you so much! I cried when this happened as i had so much important data on there, but you saved my life! I cannot fully express how happy i am right now. Thank you!
Waited over a month without installing windows after it got corrupted, and searched a solution all over the web but could not find. But RUclips algorithm came through and found this video. Thank you man from the bottom of my heart.
You saved me from my own boneheaded mistake. No need to go into how I got there, but my system reserved was gone. I followed you the whole way, stopping frequently since you moved fast, but when I got to bootrec /fixboot I got an access denied message. Oh no, I'm still screwed but I went ahead and did the last command bootrec /rebuildbcd and restarted. The feeling of relief when I saw my desktop was most excellent. It still worked even though the fixboot command was denied. Thanks again T, I'll definitely return if I ever have another problem I need help with. I'm book marking this video so I won't forget how to find you.
You are a lifesaver. What happened to me is I removed my HDD to be used by my other PC and formatted it. When I boot my first PC it just wont boot anymore. All the guides i found in the internet are all useless. Only yours worked. Thank you very much.
I have been struggling with trying to fix the bootloader issue on this Win7 machine for days, and you have just saved the day. Thank you so much for the video with clear steps.
My god, you're a lifesaver, man. I was dicking around in my BiOS and changed something I shouldn't have, but you saved me from having to reformat my entire system and lose all of my Lightroom catalogs I had just gotten through organizing.
Hey Chris, Absolutely brilliant! I had a win 10 drive (from our accounting dept!)I was for sure was corrupt after cloning to M2, but I tried this and it fixed it and booted up no problem!
You are a god among us. Cheers from Jerome here in Ontario.
Thank you for actually explaining what the commands do instead of expecting the audience to blindly type them. you're a god
I just wanna say, thanks. coz I followed a lot of guides and they didn't have a lot of info or didn't go into depth enough and care to explain. from now on, I see a ctt guide I shall follow. you know what you're talking about and you know what you're doing, unlike the other guides...
OMG, I'm almost crying typing this. You saved me so much time and money!!! Much success to you and your loved ones! Thanks again!
I just used your directions to fix a Windows 10 system that I cloned. Windows will recognize two disks with the same signature. Using the 'uniqueid' in partdisk can be used to change the signature, but it can also make the drive not bootable. Using your turorial, I was able to get Windows to boot properly again. Thanks for the directions!
Thanks for your assistance. My PC would not boot after I accidentally deleted my boot partition. Your directions were right on the money. PC rebooted after I followed your instructions.
Three years afterwards, you saved me a lot of trouble. Thanks man.
Hey Chris, was getting this error "An operating system wasn’t found. Try disconnecting any drives that don’t contain an operating system" for two days, tried everything, was getting really frustrated worried about losing my data but your step by step process corrected the boot issue and fixed the problem in one go. Blessings bro, Thanks!!! 5 Star Ratings*****
Thank you so much, Chris.
It worked for me on non-server, regular Windows10 !
Please note two weird points of interest :
1) I had to use caps for SELECT DISK command for it to work so then used caps throughout after that.
2) command BOOTREC FIXBOOT still access denied ( ! ) [BOOTREC /FIXMBR and BOOTREC /REBUILDBCD still worked and everything else too] . I got a clean boot to windows !
You're a star ! Live long and prosper, Sir.
After days of searching, reading, watching and testing I get your video in my feed and allthough I havent tried it yet, I'm still impressed (and a bit frustrated) that you explained and showed more steps to the process than ANY of all the things I've found! I got a good feeling about my next attempt at repairing my system =D
Hey Chris, I accidentally screwed up my efi partition yesterday, been really worried the whole night, tried 10 different fixes to no yield, luckily I got this video’s link in some google search, problem solved. Thanks a ton👍 Subscriber for life.
Amazing, brilliant, you saved my PC. I deleted my EFI partition while in my Linux OS in a differet partition, then could not boot even from any bootable USB pen, then after a lot of messing around with the BIOS and using your video instructions to rebuilt the boot loader EFI partition, all good, phew, what a relief, thank you so much.
Man, congratulations, I was almost losing the hope on recovering it.
I was able to use a bootable W10 usb to fix Windows 11 boot. Thanks a lot!!
Save my day. I tried everything on RUclips about this. Only your method work.☺
I love you!
I gotta add something: if you're using a USB drive with Windows and after "bootrec /rebuildbcd" you get "The requested system device cannot be found" error - make sure to try 2.0 usb ports. I turned off the PC, switched to usb 2.0 port and it worked like charm
I TRIED *EVERYTHING AND ONLY YOURS WORKED!* THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! Everyone was always doing the same thing with those last commands but _IT NEVER WORKED!_ Thank you for teaching me how to format the exiting boot and create a new one! Bless you!!!!
Thank you so much, Sir, for such clear-cut instructions as opposed to other postings! This really rescued my Windows partition after I mis-wrote the Boot Loader while installing Ubuntu 21.04 in my dual-boot setup! As someone said in the comments below, this video deserves for that like button to be really jammed on! Thanks once again!!
youre not the only one....
Yeah you're not the only one
me too haha
EXCELLENT EXCELLENT!! Nothing else worked. Did start up change in msconifg, got blue screen of death, would not system restore, would not rest / save files. Tried many routes, this was the one that ONLY WORKED. He talks fast, write it down and double check the commands in command prompt (admin).
Thank the Lord and you, my friend. I had followed all those other articles and videos you spoke of and I was still having trouble booting windows. Your video filled in the blanks, so to speak.
Chris, things were going great until I hit bootrec /fixboot at which point I got the message “access denied.” Any ideas?
use bootrec /nt60 sys to get access
Man...it is truly different way.......my system booted...AT LAST! thumbs up...liked and subbed
Lifesaver man. Gone through several tutorial of bootrec but failed.
I can't explain how thankful I am. You probably saved a lot of my data, time and money. Thank you so much.
My pleasure 🥰
Dude, you save my freaking day! I´ve been struggling with something all day and the content here really led me to solve my issues. Thank you very much
When going to bootrec/fixmbr and bootrec//fixboot My system cannot find the specified path.
Thank god. Thank you times a million. Been trying for two days after I was trying to install a second OS and formatted the System reserved partition by accident and your method was the key to my solution and the resolve to my detriment. Thank you so much holy...
Thank you! It didn't work exactly as it should for me as I will explain, but I managed to boot back into Windows with your help.
Now I'll explain a few things that might help others.
Firstly, my drive is GPT not MBR which gave me doubts about following this guide as I researched and found that bootrec /fixmbr does not work on GPT as the name might indicate. I ran it anyway expecting an error but it did actually run, whether it did anything or not, I don't know. But you *may still be able to use this guide to fix your problem even if you have a GPT drive.*
Ok so here's my problem: I installed Pop_OS and this broke my Windows 11 boot loader. I inspected further and found that my issue was different to most as when I checked in diskpart I found that my EFI partition was simply and completely missing, so I ended up shrinking my windows partition and creating a new system partition altogether (easy to find guides for this part). I actually followed a guide for this that sent me down a weird path, which I didn't realise at the time. I was instructed to shrink my C drive by 500mb and then create a 200mb partition for EFI, and a 128mb partition for something else which ended up not being necessary. All I would recommend is to 1) shrink C partition by 500mb, and create your EFI from that, from this point on you can run all the commands from this video. The only difference is my EFI partition is now 200mb, but this doesn't seem to be an issue.
Next it's worth noting that cmd kept reporting that it was finding 0 Windows installations on any of my drives/partitions, as is the case in the video, only I'm not running a VM. Despite this, I continued to run the various commands, and eventually when I rebooted and hit F12, the Windows Boot Manager had reappeared in my boot list!
To be honest I'm not 100% sure what part of the process fixed my Windows EFI, as I took elements from various tutorials and partly just used common sense and troubleshooting to figure out what I should do next based on what I had already done, but the upshot is I managed to recover from simply not having an EFI partition despite not finding the exact guide for my exact issue. My best piece of advice would be this: *periodically reboot your machine between steps!*. If you get into cmd through your Windows installer USB and you start running commands, don't be afraid to exit out and see if anything has changed in between time. You may not realise that your issue isn't exactly the same as the one in the guide your following, and you may not need to follow each and every step. I rebooted especially after running some bootrec/fix/rebuild commands, if you run a command and it looks like it has successfully completed, just check if that has resolved the issue prior to running more scary commands.
Oh, also I nearly forgot, but the bootrec /fixboot command didn't actually work for me, I was greeted with an "Access Denied" error when trying to run it, but, clearly that didn't matter as I fixed the issue without that command. (I read that different Windows build installers may deny this command where other builds may authorise it).
The main upshot of this comment is that if you are struggling, you may be better off saving time, and instead of trying to find a tutorial for your exact issue, maybe corroborate elements from different tutorials, and apply some logic to your troubleshooting. What helped most for me was learning a) how to create a new system partition through diskpart, and b) learning all the commands in this video/other guides. The rest was just proceeding with caution, periodically rebooting, and being able to adapt when I couldn't follow a step exactly in a tutorial.
Hope some of this helps others as it was pretty frustrating for me reading so many comments saying "Thank you so much this saved my life!" when this absolutely wasn't the case for me.. Just persevere and you'll get there!
Thanks for the guide, it did help me out a lot even if my issue was a bit more complicated... xD
YOU ARE AN ABSOLUTE SAINT HOW COULD I EVEN THANK YOU MORE. ALL THE OTHER VIDEOS DIDN'T HELP AT ALL!
Thank you sooooooo much dude!!! You saved my dual boot with Ubuntu. Windows 10 to 11 update messed up the boot files and this was the only solution that worked. THANKS
1:52 for me it says:
Virtual Disk Service error: This operation is not allowed on an invalid disk. The disk may be invalid because it is corrupted or failing, or it may be invalid because it is OFFLINE.
What should I do?
thanks it worked for me. i was about to reinstall windows before i do that i just searched for a solution and got your video. now my lap is booting perfectly. thank you so much.
I have used these commands from different videos but don't know the sequence. Now I got your video with proper reason and sequence. Thanks a lot
Thank you! I watched this and your related videos and gained a much better understanding of what these partitions are about. Watch several because you NEED to understand everything before you start wiping out partitions.
In my case the disk had a long history: started with Windows 7 over ten years ago, upgraded to Windows 10, cloned, then moved to a different machine. So the disk had 4 partitions: 1 = boot, 2 = Old Windows 7 boot (I believe), 3 = Actual Windows 10 partition, and 4 = God knows what. So following your instructions was great for being confident the boot partition was good. But it still wouldn't boot. So I figured partition 2 was causing the problem because it was not the Windows partition. Deleted partition 2 and it boots now!
Check and re-check before deleting a partition though. I was only comfortable doing it because I had 2 full backups.
On the formating partition step I get error that I haven't selected anything , but I selected partition 1
Me too
Damn man, 5 years later and you saved all my data from my primary disk, not sure why the boot partition got deleted or erased, anyways thank you so much bro
Thanks for doing this video. It helped me to restart my windows 10 pro and saved me from reinstalling windows 10 and reloading all my programs and files.
I totally borked my install trying to be tricky, these couple of tutorials saved my bacon. Thanks a bunch. J
oh my fucking god, after the struggle of not setting up my linux install correctly and after the pain of dealing with partitions and reading through forums, your video came up as a salvation. Thank you, really!! Really good tutorial
I was extremely nervous when my pc didn't boot but thankfully because of your tutorial I successfully fixed thanks a lot
Same, I was shaking a lot
when you know how to fix bootsector or boot partition its pretty much easy from there
After struggling for hours I came across this superb tutorial which saved my day. Thankyou so much! I'm your new fan.
At 2:01 i typed format after selecting partition 1, which was the reserved 15mb partition.
I pressed enter then it says no volume selected.
1:51 what if the recovery partition is missing and there's only 1 partition. How can you create it in cmd? Thanks!
Thank you very much for this video, had to shrink the main drive and recreate the 500mb efi partition first since my Windows installation had put the boot partition in my old HDD that I formatted causing an error that says "Reboot and Select proper Boot device" every time I try to boot my pc. After recreating the partition, I followed every step that you said in this video and my PC is booting normally again. :)
Hey thanks for this tutorial! Works for windows 11.
For some reason when I reformatted my second drive it had the boot files on it, so this video was a massive help. I had to do a couple extra steps (creating new system partition), but couldn’t have done it without the video. Thanks!
This exact fucking shit happened to me. Like wtf, why was my boot info on a different drive???
How did you change the location of the boot partition ? I want to move windows onto another SSD I have so it has its sole drive to work on , problem is the boot partition is on my HDD/SSD hybrid , how would I go about changing the location like you did ?
Even though I was told Access denied when I ran bootrec /fixboot, I continue the following instructions and it worked, thanks.👍
when i typed bcdboot C:/Windows /s g: i get an error saying "Failure when attempting to copy boot files."
Had the same problem. Select both partition in diskpart and make them active
@@johnnyb198 which partition is that system reserved and windows partition?
Do you have any other boot partitions for dual boot?
Same issue here? Can you help?
@@johnnyb198 what do you mean by Active?
Do you mean assigning a letter or something else?
Will you make one for UEFI too?
An alternative is to set you boot device in the BIOS to the MBR UEFI partition
Shailesh Aanand - You can do it with "create partition efi" instead of "create partition primary", then "format fs=fat32". You can then follow the rest of the instructions in the video. This article shows you how to shrink the primary windows partition to make room for the EFI partition, you can also use EaseUS (free version) to do the resizing.
www.ubackup.com/windows-10/restore-efi-partition-windows-10-8523.html
@@hycron1234 thank you
Thanks man, you saved me from buying a pendrive and having to re install windows. You are the best bro! Thanks!
I have 300mb "EFI system partition"
&
"1.69 GB OEM partition"
Can I do this still? Or what do I do?
you are a god! first video / tutorial which fixed my problem. every other solution just failed and i just thought why u don''t make a copy of a clean EFI partition and create it then on windows (i am new to linux and i didn't know how i could do this in gparted or cli).
youre gonna be the first person, i support on patreon!
Many thanks! The only tutorial which provides some backgrond, instead of just giving a list of commands.
Thanks a lot! Before i fixed it I had to rearrange my partition letters its all shuffled. God bless to you my man!
Great video Chris, but I get "access is denied" when doing the fixboot and "target device not found" when doing rebuildbcd. Do you have a video that explains how the Windows boot partition works and how the database works?
It's been a LONG time since I've used Windows (over ten years) so I'm surprised to see how much you can actually achieve from what looks like a normal old DOS prompt these days. In the old days if something went seriously wrong like that, your only resort was third party tools or, more often, a complete reinstall.
Worked great! had some issues the first time I tried it on WIndows 11 showing "C:" was not available so cleaned up partitions with windows disk manager in another computer to leave less partitions, I also updated to the latest BIOS for my motherboard and finally I was able to assign letter C: in another drive, followed all the instructions to the "T" and saved my new computer can't thank Chris enough.
??? At 4:35 it Said bootrec is not recognized????? Why??
Thanks so much for posting this video, its got my PC working again. I'll leave my partitions alone from now on!!!!!
At fixboot it says access denied
i got the same problem
Same
Same
I tried everything and this video legit saved multiple tb of data love you man
When I do the /rebuildbcd thing, it asks my if I watnt to add the installation to the boot list.
When I say Y, it says 'cannot find requested system device'. When I say A (All), the same.
In my case it still said "identified Windows installations: 0" but when i did a reboot, it started Windows as expected. Thanks for the tutorial. 👍
Now I need to find out what happened to the system-reserved partition in the first place.
Followed the steps outlined applied to two machines driving me nuts and in both instances following other methods but yours worked completely, restoring booting into the desktop and OS. Thank you so much!
Thank you so much for this video it helped me out a lot. No one really goes into detail on how to format the partition. Because of this video I was finally able to make my drive bootable.
Thank you.
i have 3 partitions listed, what shoul i choose?
Did you find an answer?
Excellent solutions and worked for me on 2 pc. It saves lot of time without reinstalling OS. Great help and appreciate your effort for making this video. Thanks again
This video along with the useful comments are phenomenal
Access denied from bootrec /fixboot cmd typing time
@@michaelhill7774 i have the same issue and tried those commands yet still get access denied
@@profitvestor And you're booting from a USB?
@@michaelhill7774 im still getting access denied
@@michaelhill7774 I see the same issue, access is denied
Had this issue a couple of times on client's computers.
Doing a chkdsk /f /r before using the bootrec command worked everytime.
When all else fails, use fdisk and perform a low level format of your boot drive!
This was a very well detailed and directed fix, solved my problem perfectly. Great video! Thank you for the assistance!
Hi Chris, this was excellent. Only one thing was that I got an element not found error when I was at the bootrec /fixboot part. I resolved this by setting the System Reserved partition as active and re running the command. thanks.
yo ik im bit on time but do u remember it booting up immediately after the bootrecs cuz i had to do a start up repair too for some reason (windows 7)
How did you make it active? I tried to run on disk part the command active for the selected system reserve partition but it says that it can only be used on fixed MBR disks
@@barret1n Hi friend, It's two years now, but I am pretty sure that I would have used the active command on the partition in DiskPart.
A lot of times when running these bootrec bootfix type commands I have found that there is a bit of trial and error and they rarely follow the exact path of the instructions. Good Luck.
Would this format my os drive? Meaning losing all my files?
Man this saved my butt after cloning my old SSD to a new M.2 SSD. My Windows didn’t wanna boot up and kept giving me the blue screen. I was getting really desperate. Thank you so much 🙏🏻🙏🏻
apparently I need more help! I can walk through all the steps, but I get to the end where we bootrec /rebuildbcd and it scans the drive... It says it was successful but at 5:02 you mention it should show my partition. It does not, it says "0" just as yours does. before those last few steps i can do the /Scanos on the drive and partition and it shows all my windows files on that drive. SO, what am I missing? why do i get to the end and nothing is really there and it still won't boot?
I just noticed in my BIOS, now i have TWO boot drives, exactly the same hard drive, but its recognizing two boot files. I switched which one would boot first, and still neither work. ugh.
This video helped me with a boot issue even now! Thanks.
Another Windows installation saved 😅; Thank you for the complete guide. 🙌
Is this only for mbr partitions? couse i have gpt partition table and its has others partitions too, not only 2, like he shows in this video
Bootrec fixboot "acces denied"
This is real, what do I do now??
@@Tie_Mu don't worry!
I completed all the steps but I couldn’t complete the last step. It gave me an error system device not found. Because of that I browsed through all over the internet. But after several youtube videos and tutorials I just figured out that it just only need “bcdboot c:\windows” this command phase to be completed. After figuring that out I just restarted my pc and then voila 😭 Pc turned on perfectly. FYI : I accidentally deleted whole my system reserved partition and following these steps really helped me out. So I’m here to tell you, even if your “rebuildbcd” command gave you an error, try to reboot and see if your system boots, because even though just only that command failed to execute, My system got booted. So I think this will help someone.
same here. Now my hard drive appears twice in the UEFI (the first time with the name of the harddrive and thw second with the windows boot manager prefix). It won't directly from the hardrive bit it does froom the boot manager. idgaf it works!
When I do DISKPART>Format, it says 0 percent completed and just stays there
This was happening due to secondary HDD that was not readable. So detached it, then ran this command and then Diskpart command worked
I have i problem :when i write the comand c:\windows /s G: /f all
It says that :failure when attempting to copy boot files
What can i do please ?
Me too
Hey did any of you find the fix...?
Thank you so much, I accidentally deleted my windows boot partition while installing pop os and this helped me fix it!
Hey! I just did the same. But I am not able to boot into Windows at all. How does it work?
The proceeding was flowing well but when I`ve tried the BOOTREC /FIXBOOT command, it's returned ACCESS DENIED. How can I solve it?
Just dont mind it. Move on to the next commands. It really works
@@gurcanme on next command im getting the requested system device cannot be found (thats if i press Yes)
It worked.. although the fix mbr says access denied, when i reboot the unit to it's bios.. the boot manager appeared (which is missing in my case) and boot into it then i worked.. a big thank you.. you saved me from formatting the entire drive and reinstall windows and everything haha.
I'd be trying in vain to fix my "system reserved" partition after a bodged "shrink" operation. I always got partway to a solution with tools like Macrium Reflect, EaseUS / MiniTool partition wizards -- BUT nothing I tried would complete the last piece of the puzzle which is doing a clean format of the boot partition as you've described. Nice work, and thanks!