[SOLVED] Backing up BCD?

[imthebigchief]

Hello, I'm a computer tech. I have a client who managed to corrupt his Win 10 BCD twice in the past week - once after a power failure, and once when he was trying to hook up the UPS that I had him buy, even though I told him to wait for me to do it.

The first time I could not get any of my normal command methods to work (access denied and other errors), trying to repair from a boot cd also failed. I was finally able to get it to repair itself by shutting it down as it was handing over from the bios to the windows boot enough times to get the screen that said your computer was not shut down properly, and having it do an automatic repair.

That method works well, but this is a pretty fast machine with an SSD, and the handover time is apparently about 1/10 of a second, and I could never get that screen this time. I booted into my multiple tool boot flash drive, and finally figured out that the BCD was no longer in System partition. It was in the System Reserved partition. Since I was there, I went ahead and renamed the BCD file and rebooted into the Win disk, went to the correct partition, and did Bootrec /RebuildBCD, which fixed it right away.

So, I want to know if I can copy the BCD file to his backup drive for future use. I realize that I will need to do that by booting into something else, as the system reserved partition is not normally accessible from within windows. So, the questions:

Does the BCD change often?
After windows updates?
After the Semi-Annual update?
Or, can I now just make a copy for future use?

Thank you for your attention.

 

[USAFRet]

How is an automated, scheduled, full drive backup not a viable solution?

 

[imthebigchief]

How is an automated, scheduled, full drive backup not a viable solution?

Thank you for taking the time to answer.

We are already doing that (EaseUS Todo Backup - Weekly), but I would need to boot into a backup recovery cd to be able to read the contents of the compressed backup file, since I can't get into windows where Todo Backup is installed, and it would be much quicker to boot into the flash drive and replace the single BCD file (less than a minute). Plus I still don't know the answer to "How old can the backed up BCD file be if I want to replace it". Or are you suggesting that I completely restore the system back to the time of the last backup (up to one week in this case)? That would certainly be more time consuming that simply replacing one file.

 

[USAFRet]

How is an automated, scheduled, full drive backup not a viable solution?

Thank you for taking the time to answer.

We are already doing that (EaseUS Todo Backup - Weekly), but I would need to boot into a backup recovery cd to be able to read the contents of the compressed backup file, since I can't get into windows where Todo Backup is installed, and it would be much quicker to boot into the flash drive and replace the single BCD file (less than a minute). Plus I still don't know the answer to "How old can the backed up BCD file be if I want to replace it". Or are you suggesting that I completely restore the system back to the time of the last backup (up to one week in this case)? That would certainly be more time consuming that simply replacing one file.

It's not "one file", but rather that boot partition.

And for the 'recovery', you boot into the USB or DVD Recovery thing you create, and recover from wherever the backup image is located.

I have my systems do a Full or Incremental image every night. Never more than a few hours difference, rather than a whole week.
And depending on the size of the data to be reinstated, and how it is connected...it doesn't take that long.
I just recovered a whole 1TB drive, from a NAS box across the LAN. 605GB, took 2 hours.
A smaller data set on an internally connected drive, or USB 3, would be much faster.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

 

[Yogi2367]

I think Acronis True Image handles active cloning. If my expectation of the description of the service is correct, you would simply swap drives in the event of a failure and you are back up and running in no time.

 

[wpgwpg]

I don't know about backing up just the BCD, but it sounds like you've got the right solution with the UPS, just a little late for this occurrence. Hopefully the UPS will prevent future similar problems.