LFC#170 - BootMgr Is Missing

[Music] hello interwebs welcome to let's fix computers I've got a custom built computer here with boot MGR is missing on the screen when you turn it on so this is a very common fault that can hit anything that runs Windows so whether it's a desktop computer you know gaming rig like this and all-in-one or a laptop or even a tablet you know anything like that that runs Windows runs Windows can hit this issue so firstly let's just do a quick bit of groundwork what is boot MGR so boot MGR is the boot manager also known as the bootloader and what that is is it's a small program that sits at the very front of your hard drive that tells the computer how to get Windows running when you turn it on so what it's going to do is it's going to tell when the computer turns on and by and your BIOS or efi initializes all the hardware is going to look for a boot manager to start an operating system and then the Windows boot manager is going to say I have a Windows installation here and I will start it up under the following conditions and those conditions could be normal mode or safe mode or network disabled or you know VGA only and so on and so forth so that's why we have a boot manager in the first place is just so there is something to tell windows under what state it should start and so if your boot manager is missing then obviously you can't start Windows because there's nothing to load it up so that's what has happened here now there are various quick fixes to get boot manager repaired and if you have actually if you broke boot manager if you know what you did wrong then you might be looking for those quick fixes and I will get to those and I will put some links in the description time stamping aware those are in this video so you just want the police broke quick fixes you can jump to them if you want but I do recommend hanging around while we investigate how this can happen in the first place just in case that applies to you so let's investigate that because the problem is is boot manager doesn't just commit sudoku on its own and it doesn't just scramble itself for zero reason or you know I mean it could but it's pretty unlikely too so we need to ask ourselves why has this happened in the place now in this instance when my client brought this computer to me they said that the computer had been crashing on the weak on the run up to this they've had blue screens and it's been crashing and when it originally happened they'd left the computer running they came back and the computer was just off and when they turned it on again they've got boot manager is missing so this computer has been having a bad time on the run up to this so I don't think that this is just simply a software glitch I don't think this is a Windows Update that didn't install properly or something like that because the computer has been having a rough time there so we need to run some hardware tests to find out what might have happened to cause this so let's take a look at the hardware we've got in front of us so as you can see we've got quite only we've got a really nice clean gaming rig here we've got a skylight platform down here Corsair water cooler we've got an MSI 970 nice Corsair power supply and then we've got a dual drive setup with a Western Digital terabyte hard drive and a corsair 128 gig SSD so firstly we want to do a visual inspection see if there's any reason why this computer may have been having a bad time you know are there any hope there any cables that are loose or hanging out you know everything is plugged in correctly it all looks really nice it's a very clean honest build and the fans are all spit in those are all working the water cooling system is working I can feel water flow in those pipes so that's all good I can't feel any heat coming off the radiator but you know I don't think that's going to be our issue I don't think this thing would have been overheating but we will do a check for that when we finish servicing this computer we'll just quickly run it up to temperature and make sure that that is working however if that was the issue then that's not something we're going to look at right now so the visual inspection is our past then however we do notice that we do have an SSD and that is slightly more awkward to test so we need to check our SSD to make sure that that's okay and then the other thing that I want to do is because we've been getting blue screens I want to check the memory as well to make sure that there's nothing wrong with the memory Jules we've got a bad memory module in there we're just going to keep having problems and even if we fix the boot manager it's just gonna get scrambled again by bad memory so let's look into that let's start working on our SSD first because once we get that on to some kind of test cycle or backup cycle we can check the memory while that progress bar is running so let's turn this thing off and call the SSD out now unfortunately to really do this job properly you will need another computer on hand just simply because if your computer's in a non-starting condition then unfortunately you need something to do your Diagnostics with it is possible to get out of this just by reinstalling Windows and we'll get to that a bit later on and however just sadly the nature of computer repair is that if you want to do the no data loss solution you're going to need another computer on hand so find your family computer borrower mates computer something like that what we need to do now is we need to connect this SSD up to our Diagnostics machine in order to try and recover the data from it and check if it's ok so you can use a laptop or a desktop computer with this and depending on what you have depends on how you can connect it so if you've got another desktop computer then that will have 0 88 cables in it like your source computer and you can just plug this thing into a spare serial ata connector in the computer and that's what I'm going to do with my workstation alternatively if you don't have a desktop or if you've got a laptop you can use a harddrive dot like this so this is just this is a hard drive dot that can take two and a half inch or three and a half inch hard drives and it just adapts to USB and I've got USB output from there and just a power connector for the drive as well alternatively other flavors that you might see is something like this this is just simply a cable adapter we've got USB at one end and at the I've got serial ata and then I've got the old legacy parallel ata connectors as well so I can also connect it up by map so so I can just plug this guy into the back of the SSD and now I have a USB connection to another computer so this is fine as well it's not as quick as a serial ata camp interface but it works so let's get this hooked up okay so if I right-click on the Start menu and click computer management now I'll just put that over there and go to Disk Management this will show me all the partitions and disks I've got connected to the computer at the moment so the first two drives here this westin de jure ed and this 250 gig SSD those are the system drives on my diagnostic machine on my host computer and then I can see we've got a 120 gig drive that has appeared at the bottom at disk - so that's the drive we've just plugged in and you can see that's the label Corsair which is another another giveaway there and this has got a fairly typical partition setup we've got the 100 megabyte system reserved partition at the front that is where our bootloader should be located then we've got the the main partition that has the Windows install on it I don't want to call it a system partition because it's we refer to as a system partition because you've got your Windows system on that but there's system partitions and then there's system partitions the point is that's where Windows is and then finally we've got a recovery partition purged out on the end so this is a completely standard set up here with the three partitions so the first thing that I want to do is because this is a customer computer and at the moment there is a danger to the data because the computer doesn't turn on so what I want to do is I want to take a backup of this Drive and this will achieve two things firstly it will take a copy of the data so we know that we won't lose anything and in addition to that while we're trying to backup the drive we can find it we can look at it and see how it's behaving and see if there's any reason to believe that there's a problem with it so I'm going to start off the backup program I use which is called Drive snapshot now drive snapshot is an imaging program that I use you can download it from Drive snapshot de and this creates disk images of drives which is very useful for archiving drives that's what the disc images are so the easiest way to demonstrate this is just to run it and show you it in action so what I'm going to do is I'm going to backup a disc to a file and now I need to select what I want to backup so I'm going to scroll down here and as you can see show me exactly the same partitions as we saw in Disk Management so here's our course air force disc down the bottom so I'm gonna shift click to select all three partitions at the bottom we're going to backup all of them but just just because never not so we'll click Next and now it's gonna ask me where I want to save it so I'm gonna specify a location to save this and I'm gonna put that under my backups directory and I'm gonna stick that under a director called fractal custom because this is in a fractal case so that's just how I recognize my computer's fractal custom and I'm gonna name it distress na and sorry dollar Disqus na and dollar disc is a variable which tells it to save the file name as whatever the drive name was so in this case it will create file names for each of the three partitions automatically so let's go ahead and head it and hit start copy so this is now going to use the windows built-in imaging system and the really handy thing about this is you can actually do this with live sis with live drives I can actually snapshot the windows drive that I'm actually running on at the moment so what's natural is a really handy tool because you don't have to boot into an offline environment to use it you can just run this on any computer just by running the app which is very useful to me so it's going through these system partitions and now I think we're on to the main partition now yes so we're now into each ride and what that's going to do is it's going to copy everything on that and save it into an archive file and it shows us the estimated time remaining and also the speed so we're getting a good speed out of it at the moment we're on 5,600 meters per second and that will probably build up because we're saving from an S SD to a fairly high speed hard drive we should actually start getting fairly decent speeds out of this so the speed itself is an indicator of the health of the drive if you're getting a really bad speed light as long if you're on serial ata or USB 3 and you're only getting a couple of hundred Meg's per minute then there's obviously something wrong with that drive because it should be transferring much faster than that in this case we're currently transferring at 6000 megabytes per minute and that clocks in that's something like 100 Meg's per second I think so that sounds about right because where I'm saving to an SSD sorry where I'm saving to a hard drive most hard drives they write at about a hundred Meg's per second so that's realistic this drive my Western Digital read is capable of faster speeds than that so we'll probably see that climb up a bit but it's realistic which is what is important here so I'm gonna leave that to do is to do is backup now and while that backs up I'm now gonna start running them tests on the computer to see if the memory is okay so let's switch back to the computer while our backup runs so I'm going to get my men test 86 flash drive so if you google search form then test 86 and will come up with the website and you can download them test 86 for free and you can download it as an ISO and then you can using utilities such as a Rufus to write that ISO to a USB flash drive and then you have a memory testing tool on a flash drive which is what I'm going to do here so let's plug that into the back of the machine and now we'll turn the computer back on right so usually in order to boot from a flash drive you need to do f11 or f12 so I'm just gonna spam both of them and in this case I can see the bottom of the screen says f11 to boot menu so the f11 did it okay so the flash drive I plugged in was a corsair voyager mini so we can see that at the top so I'm just gonna hit enter to boot from my USB flash drive and now we're starting up a mint test 86 so it's going to just check the information on the computer and then it'll take us to the boot menu so this is the mem test 86 you can interrupt this for special things or if I just wait for a couple of seconds it will automatically start okay so now we're running the memory test and I've done videos on running them test 86 before so if you search my channel from mint for memory testing or testing Ram or something like that you'll come up with this so but the the long and the short of it is and this is going to go through and write various patterns to ram and then read them back to make sure that they were saved correctly and by writing particular kind of patterns that you can try and catch the memory out and trigger very common faults to happen with it so there are about there's like 10 or 11 tests to a complete pass for mem tests so as you can see on the screen at the top we've got past 33 percent and test 19 6 and rising so it will go through various tests but really what you want is one complete pass and on a modern computer we've got 16 gigs of ram in this thing I would expect that to take about half an hour 45 minutes at that kind of time and during that test we want to see zero errors so where it says errors about in the middle of the screen there we want that to stay on firmly on zero any errors at all is a fail it doesn't necessarily mean that the memory is the problem but it means there is an issue with the memory system which is probably going to be bad memory however a bad motherboard and sometimes even a bad CPU can also trigger fails in them test 86 so if you are getting memory errors you have another problem entirely I'm not going to go into that in this video unless we hit it however just be aware that false positives are a thing and you need to learn to interpret the results however if you do start locking up errors in them test 86 at least that gives you somewhere to start working with so I'm gonna leave this to run and we're gonna check back in on our backup because I can see on my screen that we have something interesting to look at there so what's this I see snapshot is running and it's picking up unreadable sectors so it's picking up bad sectors on our SSD so here's our smoking gun as you can see the transfer speed is crashing we're down to we're down to just over 3,000 Meg's per minute so I transfers meters drastically dropping and we're clocking up a couple of hundred unreadable sectors so let's talk about that so a hard drive is divided up into sectors the sector is the smallest thing you can get on a hard drive that's multiple sectors go into blocks that blocks are in cylinders cylinders are on platters and so on and so forth however sector is the smallest amount of information you can store in a hard drive now SSDs technically don't have sectors because they don't work in the same way than a mechanical hard drive does so normally scanning for bad sectors on an SSD doesn't work that's not how you diagnose a faulty SSD because what they do is they emulate having sectors so legacy computers could understand them so however and the other thing to bear in mind as well is the SSDs wear down it's quite common for sections of an SSD to fail and be reallocated all SSDs will have a section of storage either at the very beginning or just somewhere on the drive that is unallocated and invisible to the computer and when the firmware detects that a section of the drive has worn out or otherwise failed it automatically reallocates that from some of the spare space that it has and you can also do a thing called over-provisioning where you increase that amount of empty spare space for additional reliability and that can be useful in mission critical situations where data loss is just absolutely not an option however it's generally overkill for most scenarios if you backup you don't have this problem basically so even though it's quite common to find bad sex well bad sectors on an SSD where it has reallocated worn-out sections of the drive the computer so Windows should not be able to see those because this is all done at the firmware level so the fact that I am seeing these unreadable sectors means that there is a problem with the drive something has gone wrong here so we are so at this point it looks like we have a bad SSD so can we run any tests that will actually give us a black-on-white yes no answer on this well sometimes you can because SSDs are fairly specialist according to the firmware that they're running and the type of controller they have and stuff like that you need a diagnostic test that's specific to the SSD most of the time with hard drives I would be running something like CTools for Windows and CTools for Windows can run a generic sector scan on it any traditional hard drive and tell you if there's bad sectors there or not so if you have a hard drive rather than in an SSD I recommend running CTools for Windows and run a long generic test and that will just give you a black and white answer on if the drive is ok however that's not going to help us on an SSD so the brand we have here we've got a Corsair of force SSD so what we can do is we can check if Corsair have any Diagnostics tools for this and the answer to that is yes Corsair do actually have an SSD toolbox which is a utility for checking the SSD checking his health over provisioning erasing and stuff like that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start up the corsair SSD toolbox and we'll just see what it has here's one I installed earlier I generally have most of the SSD stuff installed anyway but as soon as this computer came in and I saw that it had a Corsair SSD in it I just downloaded this so here's course our SSD toolbox and as you can see as it's got drive information over-provisioning smart Status cloning optimizing and secure white so let's select our Corsair force of GS here so we can also do firmware updates and stuff like that but what I want to know is the overall health of the drive so we can do this from smart so let's load that up and take a closer look now generally speaking I don't like smart and smart is a drives built in self Diagnostics smart stands for something that I can't remember what now on a traditional hard drive smart very rarely triggers before the drive has actually failed which means that smart is basically useless because by the time there is a problem in smart the drive has already failed and you're already toast and you're better off just doing a sector scan on a traditional hard drive but on an SSD smart can actually provide you with some extra useful information and we can see that here if we have a look at the information we've got available to us let's start at the top retired block count so that the current value is at 95 and that's over a threshold of 3 now that's saying that that's a pass but that doesn't look right at all the other thing we've got here is if we look down here we've actually got a red mark here SSD life left now this is a pretty arbitrary number but that is actually flagging as failed so smart is saying there is a problem with this SSD and in addition to that we can also see the reallocation event so sector reallocations that is currently reading at 100 from a threshold of 3 so that is way over what it wants to be as well so are these numbers realistic because a lot of these this is just numbers we've got 103 and the SSD life left is one of 10 is sort of what does this mean well we can at least see if this is realistic because we also have power on ours here so what we can do is we can estimate how old this SSD is and how much usages had and see if that tallies with the life of the laptop so at the moment the power on hours is eighteen to seventy nine so what is that let's just get a calculator up and we can see if that number actually tallies with anything so let's take so 1827 nine one eight two seven nine divided by 24 look will convert hours into days 761 days so convert that into years 365 so this laptop has had about two years of solid uptime so let's assume that the computer is used every other day that would make this SSD about four years old and for a 128 gig course nforce SSD that sounds about right so it's had about four years of life and we can see that after having various failing points it's having issues this is a semi early SSD and semi early you know it's not a really early SSD but the older SSDs were not as reliable as the new ones are so the information we're seeing here all tallies up with what I would expect of for an SSD of this age so we can look at these numbers and we can make an estimate we can go yeah this SSD is kind of old and it's quite likely that is having problems now so that's what we're seeing here so the long and the short of it is we've got a faulty SSD and that is why our boot manager is gone so what are we going to do about it well I'm gonna wait for this backup to finish because then at least we've but we've recovered as much data as we can from the SSD with this many unreadable sectors there could be some files missing or corrupted in our backup but there's not much I can do about that if the customer didn't have a backup when the drive wasn't failing that's their lookout but from this snapshot backup we're going to have most of the data if you've got less than a thousand unreadable sectors you probably have more or less everything because the sector is very very small so if you've got less than a thousand unreadable x' you've probably got a pretty much intact back up there so that's got a couple of seconds remaining while I wait for that to finish let's just see how our men test is going so that's been running for about 12 minutes now we are 58% into a pass and as a confidence test that looks pretty good to me ah because we've seen that we've got a failing SSD and we've got no errors so far in our mem test it looks like there's nothing wrong with the memory so I'm gonna abandon the memory test at this point because I have no reason to believe that this faulty memory in this computer if you've got lots of time on your hands you can keep going with this just to feel better about it and just get that that one full pass however I can see we've got a failing SSD we've got zero errors 60% into our mend test I think we know where our problem lies now right and now our backup is finished that is completed so we'll take that to the start and now I'm going to eject the SSD and I'm going to take that out the equation as far as I'm concerned we're done with the Corsair SSD now this guy has failed we have taken a backup of it and we're finished with it so now what we want to do is replace this with another one so I'm going to change it out with just a modern equivalent I'm gonna drop in a crucial nx500 SSD with this thing which is just a decent equivalent and in terms of what SSD to replace with these days the crucial nx500 is a really good all-rounder and if you're using two and a half inch drives like this you're limited to the SATA connection which is 500 Meg's per second the MX 500 is more than capable of saturating that and it's a decent brand so I recommend that as an SSD the other alternative is we could also put an m2 SSD into this so he could upgrade to a more fancy SSD and for that again he can either use an MX 502 format card or he can move on to something more exotic like a Samsung Evo that would be an nvme Drive that would be a superfast however it's worth bearing in mind that and if if the if your main SSD is the only SSD you won't see the benefit of nvme the only time nvme is really useful is if you or a very very heavy user like you're running lots of virtual machines on your computer and need a lot of AI ops or if you have multiple SSDs in your computer and you're transferring between SSDs that's when nvme will really shine on this particular computer with only a single SSD and though it's not really going to matter so we're just going to drop another two and a half inch drive in this for now okay so now comes the point where we want to restore this computer to a working condition and if you skipped all of my guff about explaining about Diagnostics and stuff like that then you've just rejoined us now and what I'm going to do is I have taken a backup of the data from this computer and I'm going to restore my backup onto this new SSD now there's two things to keep in mind here is that when we restore the backup we're also going to restore the problem because we still have a mangled boot manager and our backup is a backup of a mangled boot manager so we're going to have to address that but the first thing I want to do is restore that onto a working SSD so let's plug this guy into my workstation and get the data restored now snapshot does have the ability to restore a complete disk from images where you can take the set of partition images you have and restore all of them at the same time but I find that's a little bit squicky so I tend to just restore this from file and I do my partitions one by one so let's select that and I'm going to browse and start off with the first partition so if we look at the three files we've got we have D which is from one there's our system reserved partition and we can see it's 100 Meg's in size then E is our windows partition primary two and that's about 120 gigs in size and then we've got HD 3 which is the restore partition so let's start with partition number 1 which is system reserved so I'm going to open that and hit next so as you can see I've got a empty drive here where I've plugged in a brand new SSD I'm going to right click on the drive and here restore and master boot record and what that will do is create the partition automatically in the pattern that they previously were so MBR was successfully restored now you'll notice that where we're going on to a bigger SSD here we've now got this free space at the end so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to delete the restore partition I'm gonna delete that and then once we've got this thing back into windows will then grow this partition across the end space and I'm just going to not bother with the restore partition because the restore partition is pretty worthless in my opinion I have never used it effectively so I'm not going to bother remaking it is not needed to run the computer right now we're restoring partition 1 so we'll select that and hit next so yes I want to continue and that's going to take no time at all because it's 100 megabytes done right next one restore disk from file so now I'm going to select the course at once so that was a drive primary number to 120 gigs in size open next and I'm going to select that one next again and yes I want to continue right and so now we're restoring the data from the main windows system drive now if you're moving to a smaller SSD for any reason or if you're moving from like a 500 gigabyte hard drive and you're restoring on to an SSD because you're upgrading you may run into issues where you're having to shrink your file system that is a whole can of worms that I'm not going to go into in this video that is a very dark art it can be done and it can be done under extreme circumstances but there's too much information to talk about in this video so we're not going to watch out for that though right that's gonna take I was going quite fast that's going to take about 15 minutes and we'll leave that to run I'll see you guys in a minute okay our restore is complete so I'm going to okay out of that and I'm going to eject the SSD and I'm gonna upload my man test flash drive and we're going to hook up our new SSD so I'm just going to trial fit this first because I'm expecting to have to take it out and you'll see why when we get into this I tell you reverse mounting drives like this so the cables are at the back it looks very tidy when you open the computer up it's an actual pain in the butt for actually mounting anything okay right our SSD is in so let's turn it back on again and let's see if it boots it's not going to but we'll see what it does right and we're back to boot manager is missing now this is exactly what we expected to see because we haven't actually fixed the faulty boot manager however we have resolved the underlying problem that caused the boot manager to get scrambled in the first place so now when we fix this fault we know it will actually stay fixed so now let's move on to the quick fixes so I'm gonna grab a Windows 10 flash drive now a Windows 10 flash drive is quite straightforward to make and if you google search for Windows 10 media creation tool it'll come up with the Microsoft website and you can download the Windows 10 media creation tool directly from Microsoft and it will allow you to make a Windows 10 flash drive and you can make your own Windows 10 flash drive for installing Windows 10 and you don't need to provide any license information to do this you can Windows 10 is freely available to download directly from Microsoft you don't have to pirate it and then your licensing that is tracked differently however we don't need to go into the licensing in order to get this computer running the point is you can make your Windows 10 flash drive and do your repairs just with this so let's plug this thing in and we're going to boot from it so I'm gonna stick that no-win USB 4 and I'm gonna control delete and I'm gonna f11 for boot menu okay right and at the top Kingston DataTraveler that's my Windows 10 flash drive so let's boot from that and we're going to attempt to repair our current windows install now spoilers I don't think this is going to work however if it does work it's a lot faster than the next thing I'm going to try okay can it we'll try it anyway and see if we get lucky okay so we're going to go through on United Kingdom because we're in the right country and then I'm gonna click repair your computer in the bottom left and I'm gonna hit troubleshoot so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run startup repair startup repair never ever works but I'm going to try it because it takes about 30 seconds and it might work so we always try the quick fixes first because you never know you might get lucky and it didn't work okay right back to Advanced Options right so I'm gonna go to troubleshoot again and then I open up the command prompt so that gets us to here okay so the first thing I want to do is double check that our drives are mounted up properly so I'm gonna go through some through some Drive letters and check that everything is visible so I'm gonna start with C Drive and do dir ok so that's our that's our data drive because we can see there's data there are no windows directory okay what about D ok system reserve so there's our system reserve drive so that is on the system SSD so the system SSD is there or about e vir okay that's our bootable USB drive because that's got Windows setup files on it and F dir and there we go so now we've actually got we've got a windows directory users directory here so that is actually the main thing we're interested in so it is mounted up ok fine let's see if we can do the actual windows built-in recovery tools and again these don't work very often either but I'm gonna try them anyway because it might give us a quick repair so I'm gonna do a boot rec boot re C which is boot recovery and I'm gonna do fixmbr and that is going to write a new Master Boot Record to the SSD to make sure there is a compatible Master Boot Record there now I don't think that's our issue because we've got boot manager is missing not no system disk but whatever we've done it it works next I'm gonna do boot wreck fixboot and that's given us access denied and this is one of the reasons why these quick fixes don't seem to work because I have suspicions for I think it's to do with security of the system and stuff like that but while you're working from a USB Drive it doesn't allow you to do this stuff because this would be a vector where you can inject virus viruses into the boot sector of the driver and things like that so I think that's why you can't do this but I'm not a hundred percent sir and on that whatever I mainly just showing you this stuff because these are the kind of commands you see when you google search for this error and I want to show you how they never seem to work in real life basically another thing that we can also do is we can try and rebuild the BCD so we can manually remake the bootloader so to do that we do boot rec rebuild BCD and what that will do is it will look across the hard drives for any windows installations that are available and it will add them to the bootloader and this is what is supposed to happen so as you can see it's found a Windows install is founded on F Drive which tallies with what we saw that's where our Windows install currently is so we'll say yes at that installation to the boot list however the requested system device cannot be found so there's again there's an issue with it writing to where the bootloader is supposed to go so that seems to be the root of our issue here those are the quick fixes they haven't worked so we're going to have to move on to the more long-winded one right now I'm hitting reset to just reset the computer and we'll see if that has made any difference whatsoever I don't think it will of but we'll try it and see if we get lucky ah there we go we got lucky it's been a long time since that's ever worked for me before however the the fixmbr and and the BCD rebuild and all of that jazz even though we were getting those access denied messages and stuff like that it has actually fixed it so there we go we're back into Windows it looks like we're running a very aggressive looking flux profile so it's all gone a very strange color however the fantasies actually worked cool so what if your boot manager is still broken and those quick fixes didn't work for you because as I say they very rarely work for me so it wouldn't surprise me if you're still in a broken condition so I'll show you my next trick for that first of all you're going to need to make sure that you've made an image backup of your drive so remember the SSD remember the snapshot backup I made earlier on in the video make sure you've done that because you will need it to do this fix what we're going to do is make a clean install of Windows on our SSD and then we're going to restore just the windows partition which means we'll have a completely vanilla system partition with our boot manager on it but then we can restore our old windows install on top of it and it will send boot the old one so that's what we're going to do now because we're going to reinstall windows the first thing I'm going to do is disconnect the hard drive from the computer because I don't I don't want windows to make any system partitions anywhere else except the SSD so I'm gonna fumble around behind these drives come on there we go take out the hard drive so we've got just the SSD connected flapping in the breeze there now because the Windows installer has a nasty habit of clunking the system partitions on other drives which is a pain in the backside it seems to be a bit arbitrary when that happens so as far as I'm and so it's easier to just disconnect everything else so we've got just the SSD plugged in let's boot this thing up we're going to boot off of our Windows 10 flash drive again and we're going to do a clean install of Windows on so I'm just gonna let that start up and now because I want to make sure that we've got no damaged or broken or any other nonsense partitions I'm going to clean the SSD so I'm going to do shift f10 to get command prompt and then I'm going to resize the window so my face isn't in the way and I'm gonna go diskpart or one-word this takes a moment to load so just be patient so now I need to know which Drive I want to clean so I'm going to do a list disk and we can see we've got two disks connected we've got disks zero is off 500 gig SSD that we fitted and disc one is a 16 gigabyte flash drive that we've got connected as you can see you get losses because of GB bytes and gigabytes blah blah blah so I'm going to select disc 0 and now I'm going to just type in clean and press enter and this will just nuke the disk from all that word of warning this is going to destroy all the data on the drive make sure you're backed up you should have backed up by now if you haven't already let's continue ok there we go so the disk has been cleaned on with that exit out of disk part and an exit out of command-line and now I'm just going to go through and do just a standard install of Windows so install now I'm going to say I don't have a product key because this motherboard is already activated for Windows 10 so I can just proceed through this without providing any license information and oh I think it's licensed for Windows 10 home so I'm going with that there's no reason for it to be running pro all right we accept the terms custom install as you can see the drive is unallocated because we cleaned it so we can just click Next and windows will automatically make those system partitions again and it will just make the ones it needs no more no less right let's let that go through because we're installing from a USB 3 flash drive onto an SSD this should take about 10 minutes so I'll see you when we get to the first run wizard okay right here we are at the first run and I've just gone I've just gone through and I just added the keyboard layout and stuff like that and I'm literally just gonna blast through all of this because I don't care about this windows install I just need to get to desktop so I can do a clean shutdown so I'm literally just gonna bashing user no password and I'm just going to decline Cortana no no no and I'm literally just going to enter space through all of this there we go and I'm just gonna go straight through to the desktop and then I'm gonna shut the computer down of course theoretically I could probably just cut the power at the back right now but I don't want to do that just because it just doesn't seem like a good idea if I'm patient and I wait two minutes we'll be on the desktop and I can do a clean shutdown okay we made it right-click shutdown goodnight so now we're going to shut the computer down and I'm going to take the SSD out and plug it back into my workstation again and I'm going to start drive snapshot backup and I'm going to restore disk from file and once again now this time instead of starting off with the first partition we're going to restore it just the corsair primary to partition so let's open that and hit next and as you can see windows has made a couple of different partitions and now the weird thing is sometimes these partitions appear and sometimes they don't and sometimes like we can see there's actually four partitions here but if I open up this is where it gets really squeaky because if I open up Disk Management and look at it in there in Disk Management there's three partitions there's a recovery a 100m a system partition and then the Windows partition and this is why trying to repair this boot manager issue manually always seems to be incredibly squicky because I windows just seems to make these partitions at random I'm sure there's a pattern to it but I have never actually managed to figure out what the pattern is it seems to pen to depend on what version of Windows you're running like what builds as well the hardware whether there's other drives in the computer and this is why when you start trying to rebuild your boot your boot manager manually just sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't so yeah that's why I use this what appears to be a very convoluted method because as convoluted as my method is it enables Windows to make it make the partitions itself in the way that it wants to without me interfering with it so that's why we're going through all of these hoops so anyway so I'm going to restore my Windows install onto the main partition here where Windows is so at the moment is d because pot you know letters are arbitrary how we're restoring it to there and what's going to happen now is the boot manager that we just made with that new Windows install the boot manager that we just made with that new Windows install is expecting to find Windows on that B partition so we're gonna dump our old windows partition there and then when we plug it all back in and turn it on it will still start up because there's still our Windows install where is expecting to find one but it'll have all of our stuff there as well so let's let this progress bar crack on through and then when we reboot we should find all of the data is there again okay the imaging is complete so I'm gonna okay out of that exit snapshot and safely remove the drive and we're gonna plug it back into the computer and now when we turn it all on we should find that it boots back up with all of the data intact here we go and there is all of the customers data all of their programs all of their games that can't fig that set up all intact and so that is the that's the end-all way of fixing this and here comes flux again so yes that's the end-all way of fixing this without having to do manual rebuilding and stuff like that so it's a bit convoluted because you've got to do a Windows install and then overwrite that again and things like that but as you can see that's a surefire way of fixing the windows install without losing all your installed programs and you can use this same method if you've got just like no system disk errors and things like that it's very very handy so we're basically all finished here now so I've shown you how we can approach the problem of boot manager not found and how we can look into the unpossible underlying causes for it and resolve those and then fix the boot manager not found without losing your Windows install and we showed a couple of different methods for that now again the problem with computer diagnostics is there's always slightly different fixes depending on exactly how the problem presents itself and like you know if you ended up with a faulty RAM or it was some other reason why your boot manager got mangled then your fix might be slightly different to what I've done here but hopefully this video was an interesting insight into how to approach the problem and look into it and analyze what has happened so I hope that was all interesting thank you very much for watching I'll see y'all next time bye for now you

Channel: Adamant IT

Views: 56,712

Rating: 4.9516201 out of 5

Keywords: adamant it, adamantit, computer, repair, shop, custom, gaming, modding

Id: X3Jgu_m-Byg

Length: 47min 12sec (2832 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019