Windows 10 fails to boot after change in Msconfig to Normal boot

Have Windows 10 Pro in dual-boot system with Win7 on one drive and Win10 on a second drive. Worked fine after I had to recover the Windows 10 drive. Dual-boot menu showed up each time. I noticed that in the General tab in msconfig the Selective option was checked, so I changed it to Normal.

After this, the system only boots into Windows 7, and there is no dual-boot menu at the beginning either. Since I can’t boot into Win10, I can’t change msconfig back to Selective boot directly. I tried running the msconfig program on the Win10 drive from Windows 7, but that failed.

Also, I’m not skilled with command line stuff, so I’m a bit reluctant to try “bcdboot” and other commands related to fixing corrupt files as I don’t think that applies here. All that needs to be done, I think, is to find a way—from Windows7–to change that setting in msconfig back to “Selective.” Any ideas? Thanks!

Selective startup was ticked because you've setup dual booting. You should be able to run msconfig within Windows 7 and put back the second system (as per attached picture)

Thank you for your kind reply.
I’m sending these messages from an iPad and not the PC, so I don’t have that screen shot.
However…the Windows 10 line does appear as you have it pictured, AND is marked as DEFAULT.
But the drive still does not boot and only Win7 drive boots. So, I’m at a loss here. Thanks though.

Manny

Is Windows 10 on a separate drive? If so, unplug the drive with Windows 7 and it should boot to 10. Then you can fix it with msconfig. If it's a separate partition on the same drive, you could install EasyBCD on 7, configure it and that may fix things.

Dual-Boot Guides

Hello,
I’m afraid that your suggestion made things worse. I disconnected the drive but Windows 10 drive did not boot on its own but instead I got a BSOD Recovery screen saying a needed device was not accessible (approximate error message). There was a short list of alternatives, F8 for boot options failed and only F9 for using an alternate OS managed to boot into Win7. So now I have to do this manual boot whereas before it went automatically into Win7. I have no idea why this happened. Do you?

Anything else you can suggest? I am not willing to do any kind of reinstall as IV spent three weeks trying to recover from another boot failure in Win 10. I’ll tell ya, I have come to hate Windows.

Once you are booted into Windows 7, and assuming you have the Windows 10 drive connected, you should see the Windows 10 partition and it should have a drive letter. If it does not have a drive, then assign it a drive letter in disk management:
Windows 7 Help Forums

Let's say your Windows 10 has drive letter E: . You would run the following commands in a command prompt with administrator privileges window:

Code:

bcdboot C:\Windows
bcdboot E:\Windows

Change the drive letter in the second command to match what is assigned to your Windows 10. Reboot your computer, you should have the dual boot menu back.

NavyLCDR said:

Once you are booted into Windows 7, and assuming you have the Windows 10 drive connected, you should see the Windows 10 partition and it should have a drive letter. If it does not have a drive, then assign it a drive letter in disk management:
Windows 7 Help Forums

Let's say your Windows 10 has drive letter E: . You would run the following commands in a command prompt with administrator privileges window:

Code:

bcdboot C:\Windows
bcdboot E:\Windows

Change the drive letter in the second command to match what is assigned to your Windows 10. Reboot your computer, you should have the dual boot menu back.

Hi,
I’m new here and don’t understand the reply structure so this may not come out right.
Actually I did this once before, but the W10 drive has several partitions. You don’t distinguish between them. There is a recovery partition, a system partition, and the “main” partition. I think this last one was what you were referring to, but shouldn’t this be done to the system partition, not the main, or Windows 10, partition?

KWiKCats said:

Hi,
I’m new here and don’t understand the reply structure so this may not come out right.
Actually I did this once before, but the W10 drive has several partitions. You don’t distinguish between them. There is a recovery partition, a system partition, and the “main” partition. I think this last one was what you were referring to, but shouldn’t this be done to the system partition, not the main, or Windows 10, partition?

Nope. It should be done with the big, main, Windows 10 partition. That will be the one with the \Windows folder in it.

NavyLCDR said:

Nope. It should be done with the big, main, Windows 10 partition. That will be the one with the \Windows folder in it.

Hi, and thanks.
I’m new here, and so I’m wondering if you can see the other replies to my query. If so, what do you think about the reply using the command bcdedit /deletevalue {default} safeboot. This requires booting from installation media. There is no partition mentioned here though, so I’m puzzled. I’ll do yours first.
In my last attempt to boot this drive, I used the command line to make the system partition active and then only used the bcdboot command on the Win10 drive’s system partition with the /s flag, and that corrected the issue that I had then whatever it was. This is a different cause but the failure to boot outcome is the same. I don’t mean to be argumentative, but I don’t know much RE DOS commands so I’m pretty much in the dark. I have found a slew of commands about correcting booting problems and fixing disk corruption which I have also tried without success in the past. Anyway, I’ll let you know what happens and thanks.

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To: NavyLCDR
WELL, your suggestion worked with a caveat. When the boot menu returned
three entries, Windows 7, Windows 10 (on volume 5), and Windows 10. This last gave a BSOD. The second booted fine.
So I then went into msconfig Boot tab and deleted it. Now it’s fine. Actually, the bcdboot c:\windows was not actually needed to achieve this result. Yours was the simplest solution. Thanks muchly.