How To Change The Windows Boot Logo.

today i'm going to show you how to change your boot logo in windows without messing with the bios stay tuned [Music] it's really no surprise to anyone that the windows ui is not very customizable by default you can change colors and even the size and shape of certain elements however you really can't make any major changes to the windows ui well that microsoft doesn't approve of at least not by default in reality just about every aspect of windows is customizable it just takes a little bit more work so i'm thinking about doing a series on customizing aspects of windows if you guys want to see that then let me know in the comments below but to start the series off today we're going to be customizing the windows boot logo this is the logo that you see as windows boots up with the little circle that spins in the bottom of the screen this logo is customizable for oems you may notice that if you have a custom built pc you probably just have the blue windows flag as the boot logo but if you have a dell hp or any number of other oem computers you may notice that that blue logo is actually the logo for the specific oem windows facilitates this through a custom image and text file stored in the uefi bios that the windows bootloader looks for when it boots up this is called the bgrt that stands for the boot graphics resource table this is great if you're an oem and you're writing your own bios but not so good for the casual user that just wants to modify the boot logo now you know what it is possible to hack a uefi bios and change this logo however it's extremely complicated and it could brick your system if you don't know what you're doing and so that's where today's guide comes in i'm going to show you how to modify this boot logo without touching your bios to do this we're using a free and open source program called hack bgrt this program installs itself into the uefi partition of the hard drive and replaces the factory boot logo with the one you define not only is this a lot safer than modifying your bios but in the case something terribly wrong happens it's reversible through windows recovery in fact i'll even show you how to do that too now there's a few things you have to keep in mind before following this guide the first one is that this is only possible if you have a uefi bios so if your system is not set up with a gpt partition then this guy simply is not going to work for you however if you have a uafi bios but you just don't have a gpt partition table i did another video where i show how to convert an mbr partition to gpt and i'll go ahead and tag that video right here just remember though that that guide only works if you have a uefi bios but for whatever reason you set up windows as mbr if you try to follow that guide without a uefi bios your system will no longer boot but that's okay because i did another video showing you how to fix it and i'll go ahead and tag that one right here too another requirement for this guide is that you don't have secure boot enabled this program is not signed and because of that it will not work if you have secure boot turned on in fact you might not be able to boot your system so refer to your documentation for your motherboard to find out how to disable secure boot in your specific computer just make sure that when you're disabling secure boot you're still booting to a gpt partition this will not work if you set your computer to boot in legacy or mbr mode so now that we have that all out of the way let's jump on the computer and i'll show you how to do this okay so like i said this is not a terribly hard process to do it's actually pretty easy the first thing that we need is we need to actually download the program we're using which is hack bgrt and i'm going to go ahead and leave a link to this program in the description below but once you get here it's on github it's available for free it's completely open source you want to go down to releases and click on the latest release now as you can see here the latest release was from 2018 so i don't think this is a really up-to-date program but it still works great at least it worked good for everything that i tried it on but i only tried it on windows 10. i'm not sure if it works with windows 11. you're gonna have to check it out to see if it will but once you get to this page right here you go ahead and scroll down and download the zip file right here and once we get the zip file downloaded i'm going to go ahead and open this folder up and we're going to open up this zip file and we're just going to drag this off onto our desktop so we can use it so now that we got the program downloaded we need to actually make an image that we can use for our boot logo so i'm going to show you how to make an image using photoshop if you want to use a different program then you should be able to do that as well there's a program that i recommend called paint.net that's free that you should be able to use to do this exact same thing but i'm going to show you how to do it in photoshop so let's do it okay so the first thing we're going to need to do is go ahead and open up photoshop and then once once photoshop loads we need to create ourselves a boot logo so the way i'm going to do this is i'm just going to create a new image here and i want to make this image let's say 1920 by 1080. now that we have this image ready to go we want to go ahead and turn this into a boot logo and the best way to do that is i would start with a black background so i'm going to go ahead and dump some black on here and then i went ahead and just to save time i have a couple of logos here that i'm going to use to make my boot logo so i'm going to go ahead and select all of these right here i'm going to copy them and i'm going to paste them into this graphic right here and we're going to go back and get this one here and then paste it and then we're going to kind of manipulate these just to kind of make it look a little bit cooler so the first thing i want to do is make this little computer back here be a little bit smaller so to do that i'm going to go into free transform and we're going to shrink that down just a little bit and then we're going to put the logo itself right in the middle yeah that looks pretty good all right so now what i want to do is this looks kind of boring we can i think we can dress it up a little bit better than that so i'm going to select both of these layers right here i'm going to create a new layer and put this behind the logos that we're currently using and then for this i'm actually going to play around with the selection a little bit so if we go to modify i'm going to hit expand and we're going to go by 50 pixels that looks pretty good and then we're going to go to select again and go to modify and we're going to hit feather and for feather we're going to do exactly the same thing 50 pixels that should look pretty good and then i'm going to go down here i'm going to grab another color let's do kind of a light blue here and then we're going to dump this color into the middle and that actually looks pretty cool i'm liking that so far but it needs to stand out a little bit more so let's do some effects on this thing and for effects i'm going to go ahead and do a drop shadow on the logo itself then we're going to do the same thing on this one so that looks pretty good i'm happy with that all right now that we have our logo created there's going to be one slight problem is i'm using an ultra wide monitor and unfortunately when you're booting windows up it really only respects a regular widescreen orientation it doesn't really support the ultra wide so it's going to take my logo and stretch it and make it look really funny so we're going to do our own little tweaking to be able to make the logo look good on an ultra wide i'll show you how to do that right now okay so the way we have to do this is since it's going to stretch this out we're just going to kind of crush it ahead of time so to do that i'm going to go ahead and go to my image and canvas size i'm going to change the canvas size to the current resolution on my monitor right now so to that it's going to be 3440 by 1440. we're going to go ahead and hit ok and obviously you can see now that our image is much bigger now we're going to take all of these layers that we have here we're going to select all of them and then we're going to move these layers straight up to the top right here and then we're going to go ahead and fill this background in with black oh let's try black instead of blue let's try that one more time all right there we go all right now from there what we need to do is we need to actually squish this logo so that when windows stretches it out it looks about normal and to do that it's really easy just come up to the image size and just resize it to 1920 by 1080 and when we do that you'll see it kind of squished the image right there as you can see it looks really squished from where it was before so we're going to go ahead and click on our select tool we're going to highlight the image itself because there's really no point in using the entire the entire image here most of it's just wasted space and it actually will not work if you use an image that's as big as i have currently right here anyway so we're gonna go ahead and hit edit image rather and we're gonna hit crop and we're gonna crop it into just that image right there and then i'm going to save it we'll use a jpeg and we'll just type in boot logo as the name and that's it so now that we're done with photoshop we can go ahead and close this now and we can actually get into using our program in order to do what we wanted to do so here's our boot logo right here we're just going to keep this open for right now because we're going to need it in a minute we're going to open this folder and we're going to run this setup script right here we're going to go ahead and hit yes and then what it's going to ask you now is you have a couple different options you can choose to install upgrade repair or modify or you can hit cancel obviously we want to install it so i'm going to go ahead and hit i for install and it's going to give us this little text document right here this is how you can customize how the image is actually displayed and believe it or not you can actually have more than one image so you can go ahead and play with this if you want but for us today we're just gonna change it to a single image so we can go ahead and close this and then once we close that it'll automatically open up microsoft paint and this is the default image that they typically set up but that's obviously not the one we're going to use because we made our own image so to do that we're going to come over here we're going to open this image with paint and then from there all we want to do is hit select all and then copy and then we can go ahead and close this and then from there we want to go ahead and paste this into paint and there's our boot logo and from there all we have to do is hit the save button and then hit close and that's it it should be installed now but we're gonna have to reboot the system and see if it actually worked so to do that we just go ahead and close all these windows we hit start and then hit restart and there you go we have a custom logo now as we're booting our system which i think that looks kind of cool now if you follow this guide and something terribly wrong happens and your system is no longer booting i'm going to show you how to recover it the first thing that you're going to need is a live linux distro i'm going to be using parted magic for this example but you use whatever live linux distro you want but just for the record parted magic is a retail distro that's targeted to the computer repair industry you can pick it up for about 15 bucks and it's definitely worth it however it's not necessary for this guide you use whatever live linux distro you want and you know i'm sure there's going to be several recommendations in the comments below so get your system booted off of a live linux distro and i'll meet you in linux okay so now i'm in parted magic like i said you can use any linux distro you want don't feel pressured to purchase this one that i'm using right here just because i'm using it anyone is going to be able to do the job we're doing this is a really simple process all you need is a file manager of some kind and i found that this works better from within linux than a live windows distribution but we'll go ahead and open up your file manager and then the first thing you want to do is look for the very first partition in my case my original drive is sda so sda1 is going to be the original partition but what you're looking for is a fairly small partition that has an efi folder inside of it because that's the folder that we need to modify so go ahead and open up the efi folder and you're going to notice the hack bgrt folder inside of this and this is where you install hack brg in order to change your logo in the first place so once you open this folder up you're going to notice this file right here this is going to be boot mgfw original.efi and what we're going to want to do is go ahead and right click and hit copy then go ahead and hit your back button to get back out to the root of the folder and then we want to go into the microsoft folder here from there we're going to go into the boot folder and we're going to scroll down and you're going to notice that same file that we just copied is going to be right here but this is the modified one that the program changed in order to make all this work so what we want to do is go ahead and hit paste and that's going to paste the original in and then from this point we go ahead and delete this one right here and then rename this one to take the word original out so it's just boot mgfw.efi and then once we rename that we can go ahead and close it and reboot the system and that's essentially all there is to the recovery as you can see i no longer have a custom boot logo and windows should be booting normally but hopefully you don't need to manually recover your system at all but if you do that's why i put that part in the video but if everything worked out your system should now be displaying a custom boot logo but if for whatever reason you don't see your custom logo there's a few things that you could try the first thing is to make sure the boot logo you created isn't huge the default bgrt logo i believe is about 300 by 300 pixels however i've successfully made them much bigger than that in fact the logo we made in this video is considerably larger than that but with that said i did try to make one that was a full 3440 by 1440 the same resolution as my ultra wide and then when i rebooted all i saw was the default windows 10 logo another thing that's important is like i stated at the beginning of the video this program is not signed so if you have secure boot turned on you're not going to be able to see a custom boot logo in fact your system might not boot at all so make sure you disable secure boot that's very important for this guide either way this guide provides no benefit to your system at all other than changing the boot logo it's a cool custom feature that you could do on your own system that gives it kind of a more custom personalized touch so like i said in the beginning of the video i'm considering doing more videos on customizing windows so if that interests you make sure to mention it in the comments below and i'll definitely start doing more of these if there's interest in them and also check out this video that i did a while back that shows you how to customize a lot of the aspects of windows 11 including the start menu taskbar and many other things you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 442,281

Keywords: HackBGRT, create a windows boot logo, change windows boot logo, boring windows boot logo, update windows boot logo, windows 10 boot logo, windows 11 boot logo, custom, Customize windows, custom boot logo

Id: OsyDH5949hU

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2022