Booting from WinPE CD/DVD Whilst in UEFI Mode

Ahh! That's where I was going wrong when I first tried with a flash drive - I didn't mark it as Active. I've just checked the flash drive that did work and yes it is marked as Active.

Following on from yesterday's exchange of posts I've now placed an order for a job lot of five 4GB flash drives that I can use in place of CDs/DVDs and I'll do the necessary to create emergency flash drives. One thing does occur to me though: You can't create a Windows Repair Disk on USB flash drive but you CAN create a Windows USB Recovery Drive. However, can you do three restarts to repair the boot files should something mess up the booting process and whilst this still applies to my husbands PC and our old spare PC, does it still apply to mine since it is now running on UEFI? A lot of questions but I'm beginning to wonder whether it was such a bright idea to convert to UEFI!

Perhaps you can put my mind at ease over this - please???

Tracey

If you have to set the FAT32 partition as active in order to get the computer to boot from the flash drive, then the computer is booting that flash drive in legacy BIOS mode and not UEFI mode. With the flash drive inserted, you should see two boot options for it. Something like UEFI - SanDisk or UEFI - USB drive, or UEFI OS on P[x] with [x] being a port number and another option without UEFI in front of it. Anyway - the option with UEFI in front of it is what you want, and that should not require the FAT32 partition to be marked as active. You can leave the partition marked active and it will be a flash drive that should boot both UEFI and legacy BIOS.

As far as a recovery drive vs. a repair disk - the standard Windows 10 installation drive created by the Media Creation Tool is a repair drive also. All the options for repair Windows that you get from three restarts to repair the boot files are also available by just booting the computer from a standard Windows 10 installation drive created by the MCT. And they seldom work. Kyhi's recovery tools drive from this forum has programs that are much better at fixing boot problems then the standard Windows 10 installation drive is. As long as you can boot the computer in UEFI mode from the flash drive, it will work equally as well on a UEFI computer as it does a legacy BIOS computer.

A recovery drive should also have the standard repair tools available as well, but will also contain computer specific files to more fully recover a system - such as manufacturer's "bloatware" and hardware specific drivers.

Then there are recovery drives which are used to restore system image backup files, and those recovery drives need to contain the same program that is being used to create the system image backup files with, such as Macrium Reflect.

Thanks a lot for the write up NavyLCDR. I think its helped to clarify things for me but I do still have a problem.

Yes, I can boot Kyhi's tools from flash drive and I think I shall have to settle for that - but the two disks I burned, there is no way they will boot the PC. When I check Disk Management with one of them it claims there is no media inserted and the other is just ignored when I try booting with it and the PC just continues loading Windows. Its not as though I don't check the boot sequence each time - I do and save it to make sure the CD/DVD unit is the prime boot device Two other disks I have, one for Macrium and another for Partition Wizard Pro boots up just fine so I think it has to be something to do with the two disks I burnt. Strange particularly since the disk not recognised on my PC booted our spare PC last night.

Anyway, I'm not going to waste any more DVDs so I'll just have to keep a hold on the flash drive. Neither am I going waste any more of your time. You've been more than generous in answering my queries over the last few weeks and believe me it is very much appreciated. Hopefully you can get to helping others now as I don't know of any other problems I need help on and you've done quite enough for myself.

Thank you very much indeed.
All the best
Tracey

Kyhi

I learnt many, many years ago that when I download an ISO file it has to be burnt to disk using a program which reconstructs the original layout faithfully. So no, I do not just burn the ISO to disk, I use a program which is capable of doing what is supposed to be done with an ISO. After all what is the point of burning the ISO to disk as an ISO. All you be left with is another copy of the ISO.

One of my disks was burnt to DVD using the program you yourself recommended, i.e. Active@ISO Burner, the other using the ISO burner module of CDBurner XP which has never let me down so far - I have over the years burnt many an ISO to disc and never been let down. The graphic below shows the contents of the disc as extracted (from your ISO) by and burnt to disc by both programs.

Tracey

Like Kyhi, it's been many years since I have made a bootable DVD/CD, but I remember having to enable special options to burn a specific boot sector on them along with the ISO. Flash drives are so much easier!

Neither of the programs I used have any such options, they just burn the ISO as presented to it and if that includes a facility for booting then that get burnt on as well. I guess things have moved on apace since you last used disks. I can't even remember having to select the option to include a boot facility.

Before I went out this morning I did some checks. I first used my husbands PC to see if the disks would boot up on his PC. They did (he is on an MBR system). I then came back to my PC and checked each disk with the different settings available on my F/W. I tested by setting the first in the sequence to UEFI: <DVD Drive> followed by Windows Boot Manager and the PC went straight past UEFI: <DVD Drive> and booted into Windows 10. I then tried again but setting the first in the sequence to <DVD Drive> again followed by Windows Boot Manager and would you believe it, it went straight into booting from the disk and this happened with both disks.

From the tests related above its pretty much as I thought: if the ISO included a boot sector then that boot sector would be burnt onto the resulting DVD. The problem was that I was trying to boot from them using UEFI: <DVD Drive> rather than <DVD Drive>.

To be honest this is the first time in over 25 years of computing that I have been told you have to choose to make an ISO disk bootable. I've always understood that if the compiler intended the resulting disk to be bootable then the appropriate boot sector would be included in the ISO and burnt to disk whatever program you use to burn the disk and this has proved to be the case this time.

Sorry to disagree with you after all the help you're all offering but that is my experience and I promise that what I've related above is true - both worked by booting using <DVD Drive> - so there is nothing wrong with either disk as I suspected all along.

Tracey