bootrec /rebuildbcd does not find Windows XP

Hello -
the original problem was that msconfig showed the system stuck in Selective mode with
"use original boot configuration" grayed out, so attempts to put the system back to Normal mode failed.

I used the established procedures to recreate the BCD (the following commands in WinRE command prompt):
attrib c:\boot\bcd -h- s -r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /rebuildbct (enter Y to add the entry)

The thing is, it does not find the Windows XP I have installed, so it boots directly to Windows 10,
instead of offering me a menu where I can choose Windows 10 or "older versions of Windows"

To add insult to injury, the msconfig shows the system still stuck in Selective mode, so recreating
the BCD was a waste of time.

Does anybody know how to add the XP install to the BCD ? I know I can restore the old BCD I backed up,
but I was interested in seeing if there was a way to add it to the fresh BCD.

Thanks for any info.
Dave

Is your hard drive MBR or UFEI and is it a gpt disk?

Samuria said:

Is your hard drive MBR or UFEI and is it a gpt disk?

No it's legacy, normal BIOS/MBR

Easybcd should do it for you EasyBCD Community Edition 2.3.0 Free Download - FreewareFiles.com - Desktop Category

Let's say the Windows XP partition gets the drive letter F: with Windows 10 running. The command to run would be:

bcdboot F:\Windows /addlast /d

NavyLCDR said:

Let's say the Windows XP partition gets the drive letter F: with Windows 10 running. The command to run would be:

bcdboot F:\Windows /addlast /d

Thanks for this, I have not tried it yet. Out of interest I also found an alternate method, step 2 in the "resolution"
uses BCEDIT to add the missing info to the BCD
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...rsion-of-the-w

I'm very cautious about EasyBCD; in some circumstances it installs it's own version of NTLDR and messes
with the boot.ini and I'm trying to avoid that.

davexnet said:

Hello - I used these commands from the article mentioned above to manually add the Windows XP
partition with ntldr to the BCD:

Bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d "Earlier Versions Of Windows"
Bcdedit /set {ntldr} device partition=d:
Bcdedit /set {ntldr} path \ntldr
Bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast

This did work, except it now booted with the graphical screen instead of the text based menu and options.
This is how it was:


This is it after rebuilding the BCD (this sample is from the net but it's the similar appearance)


What is that determines whether you get this graphical screen or the simple line selection
I mentioned above Some setting in the BCD?

For now I abandoned the BCD rebuild and restored the original, which I had backed up.
Once restored, the simple text based menu was back

In my experience with dual booting Win10/XP, if rapid shutdown/hybrid sleep is disabled, you get the old text menu.
If it is enabled, you get the Win10 graphical BCD.

Sometime in the past i had entered the command
Powercfg -h off
This was before I recreated the BCD. I think this disables fast start and hibernate. Assuming some indication of this makes it into the BCD, perhaps things got out of step when the new BCD was created