Reflect rescue CD won't boot  

Yesterday, I used Macrium 7 to make the CD, with all defaults. I didn't touch the computer while it was burning. When it had stopped burning, I looked at it with Explorer and saw that under "Files ready to be written..." there was desktop.ini (which is still there since yesterday).

Presumably, it was too late anyway since you can't add any more files to a finished CD.

This seems to say it's irrelevant:
dvd burning - Why is desktop.ini "Ready to Be Written to the Disc" of any CD or DVD inserted under Windows 7? - Super User

D:\EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi is present, which AFAIK is the essential file.

The behavior: Today, I set boot order to start with the CD. It made the CD noises, but instead of booting from the CD, I saw the "press any key to boot from CD" prompt. I did press a key, the CD went into full spinup but never booted. My Lenovo L340 then went into a normal Windows 10 bootup.


17041.1

[I don't have a lot of spare CDs left, so I dont'l want to go into full trial-and-error mode.]

Bree said:

That is probably because you have a UEFI bios with secure boot enabled in the bios. Go into the bios settings, disable secure boot and try again.

Thanks, but I had already disabled secure boot a week or so before even trying Reflect.

1) Use CD-RW you can then erase and re-use the CD. This is what I do each time when re-burning the Macrium Rescue CD. Also make a USB key drive one. I do both.

2) Update the CD sometimes. Mine are all dated Sept 2020.

3) You have to be very quick* with "press any key to boot from CD or DVD..." otherwise it just continues on to the usual Windows boot.
The optical drive is actually quieter when booting from CD. The fact it is noisy means you were not quick enough with the key press, and it will continue to boot up to Windows normally.

"D:\EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi is present, which AFAIK is the essential file."
Indeed that is correct, so you seemed to have burned CD correctly.

Mine is OK with Secure Boot enabled. Just the Boot order changed to Optical drive first (or USB).
* very quick as in a reaction timer...

@cereberus @Helmut @Ghot

My thanks to all 3, your advice gave me an objective overview.

(1) Well, the bootable Windows Repair that I had made via Win10 works fine.

(2) The bootable USB I just made via Reflect works fine.

So maybe that Reflect-made CD was just bad somehow. I think I'll try my one rewritable CD later today.