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BCDEdit on an Offline drive

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by chadley 3 views

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Hello to all,

I have spent the greater part of 2 months fitting this.
I am a system builder, and I have a new task which is to create a recovery environment on the hard drive. Intergrate this to run seemless with WDS for deployment. So we have a 10GB partition with Windows RE, and the balance of the Drive with Win Vista.

I have all the WDS function working. But the Windows RE is becomming a pain after I use imagex to restore the OS to the C: drive.

Technically the user would be running in the recovery enviroment, ergo the C: is offline. Now if I edit the BDC under the recovery enviroment, it applies the setting to the recovery drive R: instead of the offline BCD registry on C:
Can some one please help me with BCDedit?

"note: I am not dual booting, I cannot use tools like Vistabootpro unless the tool can supply the VBS scripts it runs or the cmd commands"

Many Thanks

5 replies

by rob miners

I haven't used WDS but it should work for you. It works on a standalone.

Have you re read the waik.chm from the Windows (AIK) Automated Installation Kit. This file should have all of the relevant information.

Open the waik.chm and do a search for 'Walkthrough: Build a Windows Recovery Solution'.

by chadley

Thanks Jacky for the reply,

I don't use AIK, we use OEM, I have tried to supplied scripts by MSFT from the OPK kit, the problem with a custom developement is you can't always use the defualt stuff. My system automatically builds the recovery and the OS in one swoop of WDS deployment. Catch 22 I have is that once the OOBE is completed the recovery boot (F8) works. Once I restore the system from the recovery, the OS boot breaks, If Icorrect this by adding back the lost device entries to {bootmgr} and {default}, the recovery entries break.
Then I tried to run the setautofailoveroobe.cmd, and it buggers everything up.
So now I am trying to figure out what specifically needs doing to put it all back together.

I have discovered that you can use a cmd variable. So after the recovery wim has been applied to C: you need to add the devices back to the BCD table for the c: drive. But that only applies to {current} which is winre.
How it is supposed to work is you then use bcdedit /store "c:\boot\BCD" and make that into a variable and run the balance of the corrections to the BCD store.
But it I still can't figure out what I have missed as I either get one or the other working. Never both...

by rob miners

using the OEM. Might I suggest that you download the WAIK and read the .chms as it will give you a clearer picture.

Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=94BB6E34-D890-4932-81A5-5B50C657DE08&displaylang=en

How to create and deploy custom Windows Vista images using ImageX Abstract

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/netanelb/archive/2007/11/02/how-to-create-and-deploy-custom-windows-vista-images-using-imagex.aspx

by picoohms

I found your question when trying to fondle the BCD database settings of some VHD images and found an answer after reading through some of the BCDedit documentation.

The /store option to bcdedit allows operations on BCD configuration databases other than the default. Try "bcdedit /? store" to bring up the usage info.

bcdedit /? STORE

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