Here’s how it’s done at a command prompt from a recovery environment. However, all is not yet lost! It’s fixable - but in order to accomplish it, you must recreate the EFI partition manually and then reload the boot parameters from there.
#Bootrec fixmbr the system cannot find windows#
If this happens, most people will tell you that you will need to reinstall Windows from scratch. Sometimes the tools (especially if executed externally on another system rather than live within the target OS) will remove the EFI partition and only image the Windows partition. This is most often the case following a drive image using imaging tools to a new SSD for example. Other times, forcibly removing the EFI and boot folders from the EFI partition and then executing the bcdboot command with a specific system partition parameter (e.g.: bcdboot X:\windows /s E:, where X: is the Windows partition and E: is the EFI paritition) works.īut let’s say the partition is missing altogether. If it’s corrupt but still exists, you can simply enter diskpart, select the system partition (usually around 500 MB in size and with an ID of “EFI”) and assign it a letter, exit diskpart, and then perform a chkdsk command on the new partition assignment. Essentially, the system is looking for the EFI partition, which in this case is either missing or corrupt. This is bad news on a GPT disk using UEFI rather than BIOS. Performing bootrec /fixboot also provokes the following error: The requested system device cannot be found. The boot configuration data store can not be opened. In many cases the failure is evident when attempting to perform bcdedit /enum and receiving a message such as this one: However, other times, even in spite of this command properly completing, the system still will not boot. Generally speaking, it’s often easy enough to accomplish this by executing the command bcdboot X:\windows (where X is the system drive letter) from a recovery environment. With GPT disks and UEFI all the rage now, it’s not uncommon to encounter a scenario where boot parameters need to be repaired in order to reach the operating system.