Dennis Jlussi

Repair Vista Bootup After PC-BSD Installation

Today, I downloaded PC-BSD 7 to try it out – my first BSD operating system. I was very disappointed after intalling it on my Thinkpad. Localised German texts often don’t fit into the space intended for text, the standard font-size is so big that options in drop-down-menus are not readable and it was damn slow, don’t know why. But the worst thing: Vista did not start up after installing PC-BSD. As intended, PC-BSD installed a bootloader with a boot menu, but after selecting “DOS” as a bootup option, the Vista bootup failed.

So I went through dozens of websites related to Vista bootloader fails after BSD or Linux installations. I came closer and closer, but at some point, information became very rare – as usual, my problem seemed to be more complicated than the average problem of the same kind Here’s how I did it:

First of all: This article is for people having a problem with booting Vista, while the Vista partition and all files on it are still there. If you chose to use the whole (and same as Vista) hard disk for your BSD or Linux or whatever other operating system, and therefore the Vista disk partition was deleted, there’s most probably nothing you can do (maybe apart from calling and paying a professional data recovery service).

Step 1: Vista Automatic Repair
This is said to work in many cases. Take your Vista DVD (or, if you don’t have one because Vista was preinstalled and your PC manufacturer didn’t deliver a DVD, get a Recovery CD image from here). Choose “Repair your Computer” and then “Startup Repair“. If that works for you, fine, don’t read on. It didn’t work out on my computer.

Step 2: Repair MBR and BCD
Now, open a command line from the repair options menu and enter:

del c:\boot\ /f /s
bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /rebuildbcd


This is said to work out for the very most people where step 1 didn’t help. Again, if that works for you, fine, don’t read on. It didn’t help me.

Step 3: Repair the Start Sector
Now, what websites say is that most probably this works out for the rest:
Enter
bootrec /fixboot
at the command line.

If you get a success message, go back to step 2, which should really work now.
Again, I got no success message but an error message: “The volume does not contain a recognized file system“. Information on the net is rare on this specific problem. But at the very end, I managed it:

Step 4: Using diskpart
Diskpart is the Vista partition manager and it is the most unhandy partition manager I’ve ever seen. You’ll love good old fdisk after using diskpart.
Anyway, enter
diskpart
to open the diskpart console.

There, enter help to get an overview. Our goal is to activate the Vista boot partition. This is usually done by

select disk 0
select volume 1
select partition 0

if the Vista boot partition is the first partition on your first hard drive. If you have to search for the right partition, use

detail disk
detail volume
detail partition

to see information about the selected object. If you’ve selected the right partition, enter

active
exit

to activate that partition and go back to the command line. Then follow steps 3 and 2. This helped me and – according to the rare information on the net – also a few others. If this doesn’t help, I can’t help you either, sorry.

Thanks to the authors of information that I found here, here and here.