In the thread, No boot device… in my last post I wrote, “Everything’s like it should be now, all partitions aligned, and both sides of my dual boot working as they should.”
I had booted and rebooted, hibernated and woke up that laptop a number of times over the weekend. Evidently, the last time I closed the lid, I had the AC charger plugged in and it just didn’t register in my mind. It didn’t hibernate, it went to sleep, which means it keeps enough power on to keep the RAM refreshed, and doesn’t write it out to hiberfil.sys.
Monday at work, when I opened the laptop, I got the blue Windows 8 logo, then it shut down. I tried a couple of times, but nothing. I broke out the pencil, and got what needed to be done accomplished, then put the laptop on the charger in my truck, and tried to wake it up again; same story. So I booted into the Dell Diagnostics, discovered that the battery was at 1% and charging. I let the diagnostics run, stopped it on the memory test and rebooted, and it booted into Windows.
I transferred my penciled work to my working file, closed the lid, and went to my next stop. Again, Windows 8 logo, then shutdown. I finished out my morning, got my work done on my desktop, then started looking into the laptop. The logo meant that it was trying to resume, but it wouldn’t even get as far as the spinning marbles before it would shut down. So I decided to go back to square one.
I still had the full drive image I had made when I made the changeover to SSD, so I booted my Image For Windows Rescue USB stick, and found the image on my NAS. I decided to pay closer attention this time. Image For Windows is GPT aware, and it is SSD aware. The first time I ticked “Align to target” on the restore options. This time I ticked that again, and also “Fit to target”; IFW will expand to fill a larger drive. The old drive was 240GB, the SSD is 256GB.
That worked, and I booted into Windows 8. I used Msinfo32 to check my partition alignment, and they were all good. Next I took a closer look at the “unknown”s in my BCD Store” using BootIt Bare Metal; it has its own BCD Edit function. The failed wake seemed to me that Windows was calling for the wrong resumeobject in the BCD Store. And it was. It was calling for the MBR restore and not the GPT restore (invalid GUID). So I deleted the invalid entries in the BCD store.
Next I tried booting into Windows 7, and got a yellow fuzzy screen. So back into BootIt BM, and the BCD Store. Sure enough, there was a Windows\System32\winload.exe entry for Windows 7, so I deleted that and a couple more invalid entries. Now I could boot into Windows 7.
I booted back into Windows 8, tried a couple of hibernations, no difficulties. At work today, everything was normal once again.
Moral of the story: you just can’t beat a good drive image, and extraneous entries in the BCD Store can come back to bite.
