Problem recreating BCD on Windows 7 64bit - The requested system device cannot be found

NVIDIA drivers upgrade crashed my Windows 7 installation, so I'm working to undo the damage.

What I can do: I can boot Windows install from the USB drive, and I can boot the Hiren's Boot CD. Although automated Windows repair fails, I can get to command prompt when I boot Windows install from USB drive, and I can see my drive and all my data.

What I cannot do: I cannot boot into Windows - I get this message:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:
1. Insert Windows CD and run a repair your computer option.
File: /Boot/BCD
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: an error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data.

It seems that something is wrong with my /Boot/BCD, so I'm trying to recreate it from scratch. I've tried all the methods detailed here (including Windows repair which fails), and I'm left with the last one (near the bottom of that page). When I type the following command as in the tutorial:

bcdedit.exe /import c:\boot\bcd.temp

...it fails with the following error:

The store import operation has failed.
The requested system device cannot be found.

Many Google results say that I must use diskpart to set my partition active, however it's already set as active.

Also, when I try this:

bcdedit /enum

It fails with similar message:

The boot configuration data store could not be opened.
The requested system device cannot be found.

Does anyone know what does that error message mean, and what is the requested system device?

I'd like to avoid having to reinstall Windows since all the files on disk seem to be fine.

Domchi

Posted 2011-06-27T01:35:32.440

Reputation: 2 557

Did you try the "bootrec /RebuildBcd" command? (no quotes) – Moab – 2011-06-27T04:23:49.467

4Yes, it lets me choose my Windows installation, but when I do it fails with "The requestted system device cannot be found." – Domchi – 2011-06-27T05:14:58.427

Please type just bcdedit and post the response. – ThatGuyInIT – 2011-06-27T07:59:48.183

1Windows 7 by default doesn't store the BCD or the boot information on the C: partition, it stores it on a 100MB partition and this partition needs to be active, not the C: – ThatGuyInIT – 2011-06-27T08:04:58.677

2Sean, I get the same error message when I type bcdedit as I get when I type bcdedit /enum, please see above. – Domchi – 2011-06-27T08:27:15.620

Answers

So, here's how I finally solved it.

Recreating BCD as in the "nuclear holocaust" chapter of the tutorial I mentioned in my question worked in the end, but with one small modification. I got the idea in this thread. It seems that the message I got was telling me that bcdedit cannot find the BCD store. So, instead of typing this:

bcdedit /import c:\boot\bcd.temp

...I only needed to manually point to the store:

bcdedit /store c:\Boot\BCD /import c:\boot\bcd.temp

This is also needed for the rest of commands in tutorial:

bcdedit /store c:\Boot\BCD <the rest of the command>

With that modification, all the commands in tutorial work as expected. When I recreated BCD, I was able to boot my original Windows.

Domchi

Posted 2011-06-27T01:35:32.440

Reputation: 2 557

2Dave is correct in his assertion that the /store flag cannot be used with the /import flag - just run into this myself. The solution is to not create a temporary store and import but just create and work on the actual store using the /store flag for all commands. I just ran through it this way to fix my system and it works. I have edited the answer above to correct it. – Nathan Brown – 2016-01-20T21:24:21.607

so where is the edit? – George Birbilis – 2016-04-26T16:49:24.857

@NathanBrown: can you explain what you mean? Even better add a complete answer? What commands did you use to fix this? – Adi Shavit – 2018-05-24T09:24:25.500

@adi-shavit It's hard to recall as it was a while ago, but I think you need to omit the /import from the second command line in this answer - i.e. bcdedit /store c:\Boot\BCD c:\boot\bcd.temp and then continue the tutorial as they suggest. The edit was most likely attempted but didn't get through for some reason, perhaps if it works for you, you can do the edit once confirmed. – Nathan Brown – 2018-05-24T21:14:09.663

Thanks for answering nevertheless. I tried many things and spent way too long on it. I eventually bought Easy Recovery Essentials ($20) and it solved and fixed the problem. I hope someone else finds this useful through. – Adi Shavit – 2018-05-24T21:18:40.320

9That's very strange, since bcdedit /? store says This option may not be used with the /createstore, /import, or /export commands. Trying to use it anyway results in The store import command is invalid. Glad it worked for you. – Dave – 2013-07-01T00:32:42.437

Same error here... Has anyone got a clue? – PLPeeters – 2013-11-05T00:34:01.617

Not directly related to your issue as you resolved it, but rather to your original description (particularly "The requested system device cannot be found." on BCD operations despite all attempts to recreate/rebuild):

This error can happen if you are booting from a USB stick, and your BIOS supports a given usb slot, but the windows PE/repair environment does not!

I spent two days pulling my hair out, wrestling with this issue (the BCD store was ALWAYS unavailable with this "The requested system device cannot be found." error, no matter what I did), only to find that the problem was simply the USB slot I was plugging my bootable USB stick in. By plugging it into a different (usb 2.0 instead of usb 3.0) slot, the standard repair actions worked fine.

To make matters worse, I later discovered that it was by plugging in the wrong slot and allowing the rescue environment to attempt auto-repair that I messed things up in the first place!

Update: Another user (improvedcomputers) contacted me to confirm that this also happened to them; as all their USB slots were unrecognized by Windows 7 PE they ended up having to pull the drive and perform the repair on another computer.

Update: I had hard time even reinstalling windows on my laptop. From this post I learned and realized the Windows 7 PE does not recognize USB drive. Although it booted from the USB drive image due to some reason it was not able to start up the installation process. After whole day of efforts finally I tried it with DVD and it worked. I am using Lenovo W520

Tao

Posted 2011-06-27T01:35:32.440

Reputation: 779

Amazing... I too have a Lenovo W520 and after a power outage and Windows trying to do startup repair I was in the same situation. I successfully got into the repair environment but I was getting "Element not found" errors when trying to use bootrec /fixboot and the Startup Repair itself was never having any success.

Of course it turns out that using a USB stick was the culprit. Switching to an old Windows 7 CD did the trick and I didn't even need to run any of those commands. Startup Repair ran twice and then successfully fixed things. – Kevin Morse – 2014-07-19T07:57:19.320

Awesome find. Unfortunately this was not the solution in my case. This error can also be caused by attempting to repair a UEFI Windows installation from a USB drive that has been booted in non-UEFI mode. See my answer: http://superuser.com/a/959489/178217

– Jan-Philip Gehrcke – 2015-08-19T09:02:58.473

What worked for me was to use a USB 2.0 port (USB 3.0 failed to even boot from the flash stick) and explicitly turn off EUFI in the bios. – user986363 – 2016-01-06T18:23:36.660

While also a +1, only commenting to add information. Booting to safe mode, running a scan, then changing startup via msconfig while still in safe mode, then rebooting, messed up my BCD. The "Method 2" at http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-update/error-code-0xc0000034-in-windows-8-boot/61125822-119d-4178-93af-a25e19631ed2 did not work because I was using a USB 3.0 slot. Once booted from USB 2.0, operation "completed successfully".

– Robert Kerr – 2016-04-24T09:38:44.077

I just pulled out the usb stick while it was running and immediately the next run of bcdedit succeeded. Thanks for your tip! – Christian – 2017-05-10T06:14:29.997

Note that you may have the same issue booting from the Windows DVD: check that you're booting from it in UEFI mode (for me there are two boot entries in the BIOS) – Mark Sowul – 2018-02-01T20:04:56.670

Can confirm this works! Just solved the problem by plugging the thumb drive into a USB 2.0 port instead of USB 3.0 on Dell Inspiron N5110. – lightproof – 2018-04-04T18:29:25.250

2After just spending 3 hours trying to debug that error message, I can't thank you enough. Seriously, thank you! I never would've imagined that using a USB3 slot would've been causing that. – Corbin – 2012-11-24T02:30:10.827

4+1 Wow, same here! Just saved my life after a repartition gone bad. – mellamokb – 2012-12-21T07:14:21.187

I am exceedingly glad now that I have 2 usb2.0 drives. I was initially annoyed at them (preferring all usb3s), but now I realize how useful they are. I was wondering why my mouse wasn't working during recovery. That should've tipped me off that it wasn't recognizing 3.0 ports for some reason. – saccharine – 2013-10-20T11:23:38.327

thanks! this just fixed my frustrating attempt to use bootrec to fix a cloned drive. Pop win7 recover USB stick in another slot and you're set to go lol – Michael Nielsen – 2014-03-29T18:36:34.093

Nothing from other answers helped in my case and I had no the ability to load the Windows RE from the DVD. Hopefully this answer trapped into my eyes.

I tried solutions from linked guides and finished with no BCD at all (actually I don't know if it was there in the start). So, the thing that saved me from reinstalling the whole system was:

bcdboot.exe C:\Windows /s C:

Hope it will help someone.

Update: This finally worked for me with one small modification. My issue was a combined problem of many listed here (booting from stick, screwing the initial working BOOT).

My problem was that RE registered my windows drive as D:\, while it was C:\ normally. Running bcdboot.exe D:\Windows /s C: did the trick!

imy

Posted 2011-06-27T01:35:32.440

Reputation: 741

3Nothing else was working, but this did the trick! – bourbaki4481472 – 2015-09-09T00:02:17.290

3You are my hero. – Erwin – 2015-09-30T15:34:05.030

Oh god, this was so simple. None of that hacking together a BCD by hand crap! – Bigbio2002 – 2015-11-17T06:46:41.550

1This is it, If you boot from a USB stick, then you have to use this method, using D: drive to update the storage (-s) in D:. – razor7 – 2016-03-30T19:12:18.470

bcdboot.exe D:\Windows /s C:

worked for me as while in recovery cmd line it saw my drive i had all my stuff on as D: – user1821961 – 2017-05-28T23:45:14.793

Woww .. fantastic, this really helped my case!!!! Thanks. – Codemole – 2017-10-31T06:37:46.883

You're man! That call for a drink! – Suncatcher – 2018-04-03T04:57:13.880

Seriously, You are Elvis!!! – ArsTropica – 2018-04-10T17:58:51.183

THANK YOU SO MUCH! Nothing else worked on my friend's laptop, but this did it! TY! Hours of troubleshooting were for nothing, but then I tried this command and it worked perfectly. – Dev – 2018-10-31T22:11:22.167

The same problem appears when the Windows installation on disk is configured for UEFI boot, but the repair process is attempted from commands stored on a USB drive which has been booted in non-UEFI ("legacy") mode.

So, imagine you have a bootable Windows 8 setup USB drive which cannot be booted in UEFI mode, but only in legacy mode. One might think that one can simply change the BIOS setting from UEFI boot to legacy boot. And, in fact, after this change the USB drive can be booted, and one can access the Windows command prompt, of course. However, in that situation one cannot "repair" the Windows installation on disk which has previously been installed and used in UEFI mode.

In that scenario (boot mode "legacy" and boot from Windows 8 installation USB drive), execution of bootrec /rebuildbcd fails with The requested system device cannot be found. And BCDBoot C:\Windows fails with Failure when attempting to copy boot files.

The solution is

to create a proper UEFI-bootable USB drive (with e.g. Rufus as described here) and then
to switch the BIOS from "legacy" boot mode back to UEFI boot mode, followed by
booting from the USB drive

The repair process started from there was successful in my case: BCDBoot C:\Windows then succeeded with Boot files successfully created.

The original problem was "Error Code: 0xc0000034 - Boot Configuration Data file missing required information" in Windows 8, as discussed here.

Jan-Philip Gehrcke

Posted 2011-06-27T01:35:32.440

Reputation: 472

Forcing UEFI mode in BIOS allowed me to successfully proceed (and finish!) with resetting/repartitioning with previously created recovery drive from within Windows 8. – mlt – 2016-08-13T02:11:37.203

thank you! I spent the whole weekend trying to fix my system without reinstalling windows. This answer finally solved it for me. I had to create a proper legacy BIOS bootable USB drive, because my windows was installed using legacy BIOS (not UEFI as I first believed). Windows installation and USB drive boot mode must match. otherwise the bootrec /rebuildbcd and bcdedit commands will fail. – Buju – 2018-01-22T09:15:56.233

I had a different cause of and solution to this issue. In my case the problem was that I had used a Windows 7 Enterprise ISO to create a bootable usb flash drive with Unetbootin, per instructions here: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/10/create-bootable-windows-7-usb-drive.html. Basically, the instructions say to format the usb drive with ntfs and use Unetbootin v494 (outdated) which still had the feature to allow you to use drives formatted with ntfs (this feature disappeared in later versions).

Something tingly in the back of my head told me that non-standard procedure was going to cause headache, but I ignored it.

After an hour of forum searching, someone somewhere mentioned "don't use a bootable usb drive as the recovery environment will see that partition table and not the real one on the hard drive," or something to that effect.

Found my USB CD-ROM drive, put the real disk in there, and ran bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /fixboot, and bootrec /rebuildbcd with no issues. Windows then started fine, both from grub and when the secondary hard-drive was chosen from the bios boot list.

Johann

Posted 2011-06-27T01:35:32.440

Reputation: 451

The requested system device cannot be found.

I had the same error message when I was trying to repair windows after converting my hard drive from MBR to GPT. When I tried automatic repair, windows even reported the installed version was not a compatible windows version. I found out that the MSI bios had two options for booting from DVD-ROM which looked similar to this:

SATA3:DVD Drive
UEFI:DVD Drive

It would only start the UEFI boot when I manually selected it. Otherwise it would still boot from the DVD-ROM but not in UEFI mode. After I selected UEFI, I could both manually and automatically repair my windows 7 system.

I have now completely disabled to boot from CD/DVD, forcing me to use the bios boot-menu and choose how to boot.

wimh

Posted 2011-06-27T01:35:32.440

Reputation: 285

I've found in situations like these, that "EasyBCD" is really really helpful. I suggest you give that a whirl and see if it can't save ya.

Hope that helps dude. Cheers!

James T Snell

Posted 2011-06-27T01:35:32.440

Reputation: 5 726

I'd like to, but to run EasyBCD I need bootable Windows 7. Which I don't have. The tutorial to regenerate BCD I'm working with above, and which I can't follow through, is actually from EasyBCD website. Can EasyBCD be run from Windows repair console, or from Linux...? – Domchi – 2011-06-27T03:45:51.693

Can't install it on Windows XP which comes with Hiren's Boot CD, install fails when it's supposed to install .NET and cancells itself automatically. But even if I installed it, WinXP doesn't see NTFS disk with BCD... – Domchi – 2011-06-27T05:32:42.273

At the end, I managed to install EasyBCD on the other machine, and have it chew on my BCD file which I copied there. But I never managed to do anything useful with it... – Domchi – 2011-07-09T23:02:06.960

Boot a Windows 7 x64 install disc and launch Start Up repair, but cancel it before it starts trying to repair, you will see a link for Advanced Options, which will allow you to get to command prompt, you will need to make the 100MB partition active if you made the OS partition active by mistake.

Put the Windows 7 x64 installation disc in the disc drive, and then start the computer.
Press a key when you are prompted.
Select a language, a time, a currency, a keyboard or an input method, and then click Next.
Click Repair your computer.
Click the operating system that you want to repair, and then click Next.
In the System Recovery Options dialog box, click Command Prompt.

diskpart select disk 0 select part 1 active

Reboot and boot back into the Windows 7 x64 install disc.

bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
c:
cd boot
attrib bcd -s -h -r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /RebuildBcd

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

ThatGuyInIT

Posted 2011-06-27T01:35:32.440

Reputation: 784

You can just press [Shift] + [F10] at step 3 to get to the prompt! – piksel bitworks – 2016-12-13T12:21:04.573

On step 5. I don't have any operating systems listed. I don't have 100MB partition, never had, and my partition is already active, as I said in my question. I tried all that KB you mention suggests, but bootrec /RebuildBcd fails with "The requested system device cannot be found." – Domchi – 2011-06-27T08:34:03.123

sounds like maybe a bad hard drive or corrupted file system. Run chkdsk /r You can also test the hard drive using a Linux live disc like PartedMagic http://partedmagic.com/, which has a tool called GSmartControl for checking hard drives for errors and running S.M.A.R.T tests. It also contains a tool call testdisk, which can be used to try and repair the file system http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

– ThatGuyInIT – 2011-06-27T09:04:06.037

Hard drive and file system are OK - I can see all the data from PartedMagic linux environment. Also, TestDisk was what I previously used to fix MBR. Before I used TestDisk, I wasn't even able to access the partition. My problem is definitely the incorrect BCD file, and I would really like to know why I can't recreate it and what is that requested system device he can't find. – Domchi – 2011-06-27T16:44:52.227

In my case none of the above solution helped.

Rebooting a Windows Server 2016 VM in VMware Esxi 6.5 failed with "OS not found". I suspected an update which got installed during shut down. I was not able to fix it with diskpart, bootrec, bcdedit and restore from Backup. It had also nothing to do with EFI (secure boot) or BIOS mode.

The solution was changing the Systemdrive (back) to SCSI Device 0:0 .

An addition disk which I added weeks before had SCSI Device 0:0 and the Systemdrive was on 0:1. How this could happen, I dont know, but I suspect a Bug in Vsphere Web-Client.

Tim Haegele

Posted 2011-06-27T01:35:32.440

Reputation: 247