Windows 10 and 11 Wont Boot, How To Fix UEFI Partition

in our ongoing series on repairing broken windows installs today we're going to look at what happens when a uafi system doesn't boot anymore because of a broken bootloader in fact we're gonna break it ourselves stay tuned in the last video in this series we dealt with fixing corrupted Windows system files but what happens when your bootloader is corrupted oftentimes if something goes wrong with your bootloader you can be locked out of Windows completely and sometimes you can't even get into recovery now there are several reasons why your bootloader can get corrupted it could be a bad Windows update or possibly a virus that's taken over your bootloader that really wasn't written very well and causes your bootloader to not work anymore sometimes if you have a failing SSD it can also cause corruption that's when I typically see this problem when I upgrade someone to a new drive and after cloning their old system it fails to boot now this problem might seem unfixable to many people but it's actually not that hard to fix but unfortunately if you try to search Google for how to fix a broken UEFI bootloader you'll get a lot of how to's that give you a lot of outdated information that simply doesn't work anymore so regardless of what your bootloader problem is today I'm going to show you a method to rebuild the uafi boot partition completely this should solve any problems related to your bootloader but first we got to pay some bills check out today's sponsor is your copy of Windows 10 unactivated well it doesn't have to be because with today's sponsor VIP SCD key you can get a valid Windows 10 license for under 20 dollars stop dealing with that stupid watermark on the desktop the valid license for Windows 10. also with an activated copy of Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 for free just go to the link in the description below and pick up a valid Windows 10 license key during checkout use the code cyber CPU for a 25 discount once you have your key go to your activation settings in Windows 10 and click on the link that says change product key enter the product key you just purchased and hit active innovate now you don't have to deal with that stupid Watermark that come with running an unactivated copy of Windows 10. now on with the video now this video is going to concentrate specifically on the UEFI bootloader unfortunately at this point in time there's really not much benefit in running an MBR partition so if your system is running MBR and it won't boot then this video isn't going to help you however it's really easy to fix an MBR system if you guys want me to make a video on that as well then let me know down in the comments below also keep in mind what we're doing in this video has a very high probability of really messing your system up if not done correctly we're going to be completely rebuilding the UEFI partition that's what allows your system to boot in the first place so I would highly recommend before following this guide to do a complete backup on your data now if your system currently isn't booting then use an offline boot CD like hyran's boot CD you in order to back up all your data also make sure to watch this video all the way through to the end before following this guide missing any step along the way could leave your system broken and still not booting so the first step after you back up your system is you need a way to access the Windows recovery tools and if your recovery partition isn't accessible you're going to need a Windows install USB so you can take advantage of the recovery tools so let's jump on the system and I'll show you how to create one okay so the first thing you're going to need before you start is a USB flash drive make sure you get one that's at least eight gigabytes you can usually pick them up at Staples or any other Big Box store for pretty cheap so I'm going to go ahead and stick this USB drive in the system real quick and as you can see I already have this one set up as a Windows install disk so I don't actually have to create one but I'm going to show you how to do one so you can get one yourself so I'm going to close this up and the first thing we're going to do is open up our browser and search for media creation tool and make sure to pick one for the version of Windows that you have in this case it's going to be Windows 10 but this should work on Windows 11 as well and if you're doing this in Windows 11 I would use the media creation tool from Windows 11 but we're going to do Windows 10 right now and then from here we're going to go ahead and click on Microsoft's website make sure you download this from Microsoft's official site there's no reason to get this from any other mirror so you just click on download now right where it says create Windows 10 installation media so once you hit download now it should download it right here go ahead and click on it and it will launch the media creation tool and we can go ahead and close our browser here and it's going to take a second for things to get going here so I'm going to skip ahead to The Next Step okay so right here you got to accept the user agreement and it's going to take a minute more to get this thing ready so we're going to skip ahead again real quick okay so right here we've got two different options we can either upgrade this PC now or we can create the installation media so what we're going to do is create the installation media so we click on that and hit next and then go ahead and you can typically use just the default settings right here and hit next again and then it's going to ask us for either USB flash drive or an ISO file you're going to want to pick the USB flash drive and then once you hit next It'll ask you which drive you want to use and obviously you would select the one you'd use and you'd hit next and from that point you just follow the rest of the steps and it should create the USB drive for you now that we've made our install USB let's intentionally break this system so it doesn't boot anymore and I'll show you how to fix it okay so what we're going to do here is we're going to go ahead and click Start and type CMD and then make sure to open command prompt as administrator here okay so the first thing that we're going to do is since we're going to be messing with the BCD in this case we're going to go ahead and back it up real quick and to do that we're going to use the BCD edit tool and if you type B C D edit and hit enter it'll show you what your current BCD looks like and you can kind of see what different descriptors and stuff like that it's using in order to boot into windows so before we do anything at all we want to back up our BCD so we can recover it in the case that something goes wrong and you know it's always kind of nice to have a backup of your BCD anyway just in case something goes wrong in the future so to back it up all you have to do is type in BCD edit forward slash export space and then just name your file and what I'm going to do is I'm going to type in cprompt root BCD dot BK for backup and then hit enter and it should back up your BCD now if we go down to the root of the directory you can see right here I got my BCD back right there so if you ever want to restore from a backup all you would do is type in BCD edit forward slash import and then the name of the BCD file that you created so in this case it's going to be C drive root BCD BK enter and it'll go ahead and import it in if you type in BCD edit you can see that it's the same as it was so now let's break this system so it doesn't boot anymore to do that all you're going to do is type vcd edit forward slash set and then we're going to type in path and then I'm just going to do backslash win just like that and then if we type in BCD edit again you'll see that now the path is just set to root win which is really nothing but now what we also want to do is disable the recovery enabled because we don't want recovery to go fixing our system we want to do that manually so I'm going to go again I'm going to type in BCD edit set but on this time we're going to type in recovery enabled and I'm just going to change that to no just like that and then when we type BCD edit you'll see that the recovery enabled is set to no okay so now let's reboot the system and see what happens now the system shouldn't boot once I reboot it so I'm going to go ahead and hit start restart and we'll see what happens might take a second to restart but hopefully we've successfully broken our system I highly recommend not doing this at home because you know there's no reason to break a fully functional computer unless of course you want to make a video showing how to fix it and there you go the system now will not boot it says the application or operating system could not be loaded because of a required file is missing or contains errors yeah it contains errors because I made them so now let's get our USB drive get this thing booted up into recovery and I'll show you how to fix it okay so you're gonna have to look at either your motherboard or your system manufacturer's documentation to find out how to boot off of a USB drive on my system I just hit delete to go into the BIOS and the boot menu is right there on your system it might be F12 for Dells or on HPS it's usually escape to get to your boot menu however once you get booted off of your windows install Drive the next thing you have to do is just go ahead and hit next and then instead of hitting install now we want to click on repair your computer and from this point it just gives you the regular recovery console and then what we want to do is click on troubleshoot and then from troubleshoot you could try clicking startup repair in some cases that will actually fix your problem in fact I bet you it'll fix this system now however I want to show you how to do this manually so what you're going to do is click on command prompt and then from command prompt the next thing you want to do is just type in BCD edit and you can see what your BCD file looks like and as you can see here's the error in the BCD file that we introduced ourselves but what we're going to do is the very first thing that we want to look at is we want to be able to get access to our uafi drive because typically there's no Drive letter on that so to do that what you're going to want to do is just type in disk part and then give it a second to start sometimes it'll take it a moment but you'll get the the right here you'll get your prompt for disk part just like that and once you get that we're going to type in list disk first you got to spell it right list disk with a space of course all right there we go so now this will show us two different discs that we currently have installed now as you can see disk zero is 232 gigabytes and that one's a GPT partition that's the one we're looking for the other one this is just our USB drive right here we can disregard that one we don't need to worry about it the next thing we want to do is go ahead and type SEL and in our case it's going to be disk zero but you're going to want to correspond with whichever disk your windows install is installed on so once I hit that it'll select that disk and then we want to type in list Vol for list volume and then from there this will show us all the different volumes and it actually does show the USB drive which I think is kind of funny because we selected disk zero but that's okay what we're looking for is this one that doesn't have a drive letter and it's going to be formatted as FAT32 and it's going to be about 100 Megs in size this is our UEFI partition this is the one that we're looking for so for this we're going to want to select that specific volume so for that you're going to type in SEL for select and then type in vol one for volume one and that'll select volume one and then from here we want to assign it a drive letter so we're going to type in assign letter and then we want to type equals and then give it any letter you want I'm going to give mine V but you can give yours anyone you want just make sure that you remember which Drive alert you give it because we're going to use that later in the video so go ahead and hit enter and it's going to assign that letter to volume one and if you want to double check just to make sure it has you can always type in list Vol to list volumes and you can see right there that volume 1 which is the selected volume with the little star right here is our 100 Meg partition and at this point we can go ahead and just hit exit and then if you go to your V drive and run a directory you should see an EFI directory and if you go into that directory actually we're going to want to write CD EFI not d-i-r and then run a directory again you'll see two folders in there called Microsoft and called boot so we want to go into the Microsoft directory so if we go into Microsoft and hit enter do another directory you'll see you'll have Boot and Recovery we want to go into boot and then from there we're going to do another directory and you'll see all these files in here this is your uafi bootloader if you scroll up you should see your BCD file right here and that's the file that we modified so what we're going to want to do is we want to start over from scratch so I'm going to go to my C drive here and I'm going to go ahead and format the UEFI partition completely so for that we just type in format it's going to be V Drive and then we want to put forward slash FS colon FAT32 because you want to make sure to format the UEFI partition as FAT32 then when you hit enter it's going to warn you that everything on the drive is going to be destroyed go ahead and hit yes enter and there you go for the volume label you don't have to do anything just hit enter and that's it now if we go back to our V drive and hit directory you'll see there's nothing on it so at this point we want to recreate the drive just like it was before and this should solve any problems that you have with the bootloader now at this point we want to verify where our Windows install is at because normally it should be on the C drive so if we go to C here and hit a directory you'll see that yep there's our Windows folder there's our user folder so in this case it is C but you might have to look around you can always go into the D drive and look in there to make sure that it's not there too but in our case it's in the C drive we want to verify where the windows folder is before we run this next command so go ahead and look around your different Drive letters and to change drive letters all you do is just put type in the letter itself that you want to go to with a colon and hit enter and it'll switch to that drive so in our case it's going to be C so we're going to do that and we're going to run the command BCD boot space and then since we know that our Windows folder is on our C drive we're going to go C colon backslash windows and then hit space then we want to go forward slash s space V drive and we're telling it what the UEFI partition is and that in that case it's V drive if you used a different letter on yours then make sure to use that letter here then we're going to hit space we're going to type forward slash F another space and then just type in UEFI and then hit enter and it should rebuild the ufi partition and we're going to double check it real quick here so we're going to go ahead and go to V run a directory and you'll see now we have the EFI folder there so if we go CD EFI directory we should see Microsoft and boot just like we did before so we're going to go into the Microsoft folder and here we have Boot and recovery so we just like before we're going to go into CD boot and then we're going to do a directory again now these are all the files associated with your bootloader as well as all the way down at the bottom right here you'll see your BCD file it's at the bottom now because we've essentially replaced everything by reformatting this drive and if you type in BCD edit at this point you'll notice that your BCD has changed considerably however this is just a generic BCD just to get the system booted so now at this point we're going to go ahead and close command prompt and then we're going to go ahead and hit turn off your PC so now we have to see if it works and to do that we just hit the power button and sit back and hopefully our computer will boot into windows if it doesn't I might have to film this section over again I don't know we'll see but here we go it should boot fairly quickly if it's going to boot and it looks like it's working pretty well so give it one more second and we should be in Windows and there we go we're back in Windows now one of the downsides to this method that you should be aware of is that when we rebuilt the UEFI partition it's just a basic generic BCD file that's been created like I showed you it will get your system booted as you can see but you will lose some functionality specifically you'll lose the Windows recovery console however that's really easy to fix just take that USB drive you know the one that we created at the beginning of the video and just select upgrade instead of create media at that section where we created the media the upgrade process should fix your BCD file and create another Windows recovery partition unfortunately though when you do that it creates a second recovery partition leaving the old one just sitting there wasting 500 Megs of space you can recover that space if you want by using a partitioning tool but it's not necessary also if you're dual booting into multiple versions of Windows or another operating system like Linux then you'll have to modify your BCD file to reflect the other operating systems that's installed but that'll be for another video let me know in the comments below if you want me to do a video on dual booting with the windows BCD so hopefully this guide will help your non-booting system boot again or at least it's something that you can bookmark for later when you might need it as I've stated before it's rarely necessary to reload Windows even in the case of this where your system doesn't boot at all because of a corrupted bootloader it is fixable this system right here is just as reliable as it was before we intentionally broke it at the beginning of the video so don't be afraid to roll up your sleeves and to get a little dirty and fix a broken windows install you know it's honestly a lot easier than reloading it personally I I think it's way easier and you don't have to reinstall your programs but now that you have your system booting again it might be a good idea to make sure you don't have any corrupted system files whatever corrupted your bootloader you know it could possibly have corrupted other files as well for that check out this video where I show you the proper way to use the system file Checker in Windows that's the video that started this series and it's able to fix a lot of problems with Windows sfc scan now works a lot better than you think it does if you use the tool properly but as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 117,208

Keywords: fix UEFI boot windows 10, fix UEFI boot windows 11, fix windows gpt boot, fix uefi boot, corrupted uefi partition

Id: CZ17JrgFFhw

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2023