Windows 7 Editing BCD when it can't be found?

Are you working with some type of dual boot situation? Have you removed drive or deleted a partition?

If you run an administrative command prompt from within Win 7, BCDEDIT should work fine, unless the above situation is possible. Just type bcdedit to see if it lists the store.

EasyBCD seems to work well, but I have heard it is not up to speed with Win 7 and you need the 2.0 beta version which you have to join their forum to be able to download.
 
I am a member of Neowin. It is quite easy to join to obtain access to this program and, of course, their forums.
But 1.7, which I think is generally available on the web, works in Windows 7. ver 2. has some added goodies such as loading from USB's.etc.
 
Thank you for alll the replies abd sorry I didn't have time to give more info in my original post.

I tried easyBCD but it also can't find my BCD file and the built in trouble shooter failed to find or fix the problem. I have joined Neowin but I'm waiting for my confirmation email.

I installed Xp 18GB primary, then Win7 45GB primary and finally Open Solaris 13GB Primary

So, I have grub which points to BCD in the Xp partition, which gives me access to Xp or Win7. For some reason grub takes some time to load and currently I have a two stage load. I would like to have either grub or preferably BCD if it's faster to offer me: WinXp, Win7, OpenSolaris with Win7 as the default with a 5sec timeout.

In win7, the Xp partition is a system partition which I have temporarily assigned to g: so I can edit the BCD file. I can copy the BCD file to the Win7 partition (c:) which alows me to point grub directly to the win7 partition.

The problem is that I can't edit either BCD file c:\boot\bcd or g:\boot\bcd because by default bcdedit and easybcd can't see either of them. bcdedit can with the /enum /store but I don't know the syntax for editing when using these extra commands. You can't just tag extra commands onto the end.

I hope this all makes sence and gives you what you need to formulate a solution. Many thanks to you all.
 
p.s. I'm OK with removing grub from the MBR using dd from within opensolaris. I just need access to my bcd file. It doesn't have to be a GUI. I'm OK with bcdedit. I just can't find the right syntax given that win7 can't see it without me telling it where to look.

p.p.s The smiley in my last post was clearly unintentional. I will remember to use spaces between colons and closing brackets in future! Unless I want a smiley ;)
 
I have no reason, now or in the future, to want to edit the bcdedit, but, fwiw, there are quite a few pages like this one which might help:
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LOL. Don't worry about the smiley. We are totally international on these pages and , I think, tend to disregard typos etc and just get to the nitty, gritty. I am no champion! My typing seems to get worse the longer I try.
 
Well, I am still learning some of this stuff, and it seems the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know a darn thing.!

If you would have installed XP, then Win 7, the Boot folder that contains the BCD strore and the bootmgr would have been put in the XP root folder. You have to show system files to see these. If you would have stopped there, you would have had a dual boot of Win 7 and XP. Since you then installed Solaris, you went way over my head.

As I understand it, the Win 7 boot manager is supposed to be the primary. If you have two legacy OSes, it is supposed to use the boot.ini, possibly to get you to those. So I would think, your first boot menu would say something like Win 7 or Legacy, and choosing legacy would give you another menu for XP or Solaris, but as I said I have no experience in this area.

Check and see if you have the boot folder and bootmgr in your XP root directory.

Are you running EasyBCD from within XP?
 
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