Booting Cd/usb Rescue Media In Uefi Systems

To my mind the one outstanding advantage of MBR systems over UEFI systems is the ability to boot to rescue media in an unbootable Windows system. I'm particularly referring to rescue media for imaging software such as Acronis or Macrium Reflect which can enable users to recover unbootable Windows systems in minutes.

Booting CD/USB rescue media in a UEFI system normally only requires a Shift + Restart to access the W10 Advanced Startup menu, but what is the situation when Windows cannot start at all? If boot failure automatically triggers access to the Advanced Startup menu then that's fine, but does it? I ask because I have one laptop configured as UEFI and want to know in advance how I would recover it should it fail to boot.

 

Most tools have started making UEFI compatible boot disks. If not you can still change the BIOS back to legacy & disable secure boot use old tools. Check out ventoy - boots both.
https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/ventoy.html

 

This particular laptop I'm using was the subject of another thread when it lost the ability to access BIOS at boot. That problem still exists so boot problems that require BIOS access are still a concern. However Ventoy would seem to offer an answer and I'll get testing! From the description it offers many of the features EasyBCD used to offer before GPT/UEFI became the standard and which I still use on my BIOS/MBR systems.

 

Can you still access windows10 on boot up?

If so, here is a hack to ensure you can enter bios under UEFI.

Settings / update and security / Recovery (from left tree) / restart (advanced setup) / troubleshoot / advanced options / UEFI firmware settings / restart.

 

Hi Rep. Yep, that's the 'proper' way. Shift > Restart does the same, but both require that Windows is up first. I'm looking for a way to boot a cold or unbootable UEFI machine to USB. Hopefully Ventoy can do that but had no time to look at it yet.

 

Also look at Rufus.
Select GPT under Partitioning Scheme.

 

Does Rufus need one Flash drive per ISO or can you include multiple ISOs and choose from a menu?

 

For multiple ISOs use YUMI.
http://m.majorgeeks.com/files/details/yumi.html

 

For 20 years I've used Grub4DOS for all this stuff but GPT has put a stop to that! Thought I was done with learning curves

 

Then you should investigate Grub2Win.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/grub2win/

 

No luck Rufus and YUMI both do create bootable drives but I can't boot to any of them from cold for the same reason as before - the boot interrupt key, Enter on this Lenovo, is still failing to give me the option to go into BIOS or to select a boot drive. It always just boots into Windows. So far I haven't been able to make any progress with Ventoy either as the installer just isn't seeing my flash drive(s). I'll have another look at that tomorrow.

 

In your other thread you did eventually manage to enter the BIOS.
If needed you'll have to go that route again.

 

Post #13 might be useful, I need to dig into it. Thanks plodr

 

G2W cannot easily be uninstalled. I have looked everywhere including the "support" discussion on the coder sourceforge. THeir info does not work nor does the pgm show up on Win CP for a std uninstall.

BEWARE: If you install this you may not be able to uninstall it.

 

I'm sure Earthling has solved this...

 

Yeah, turned out to be a non-issue, as I was able to get into the advanced startup menu when I next
had a startup issue. I should have come back and cleared it up but must have just forgotten about it.
Apologies