Question Dodgy dual boot system - where to go from here?

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Bitz2020

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May 15, 2020
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I recently put together a dual boot of win 10 and win 11 (strange I know!)

My system is a Razer Blade 13 laptop (late 2019) with internal 500GB NVMe SSD.

I imaged the 500GB internal drive (using macrium reflect) and restored that image to a replacement 1TB NVMe, which I then fitted in the laptop.

Then, I made an extended patition in the free space and did a new win 11 install to that partition.

Basically, this worked but I found that each OS seemed to hang on a black screen for a long time before starting up, so decided to look into the boot record.

Long story short... through improper use of various tools, I managed to corrupt my boot record.

Through trial and error, I've ended up with two primary partitions, each with a separate OS... and an MBR partition scheme, rather than GUID. I can change OS by selecting which "drive" to boot from in my BIOS.

However, as I understand it, my partition scheme should be GUID (since don't have legacy boot in my BIOS), but I can't convert to GUID on a drive with more than one partition.

Each OS boots up and runs fine.

The problem is that I can't do any updates requiring a restart or upgrade to pro in Win 11. - I get a "something went wrong" message and then it rolls back after many restarts.

Also, if I try to use easyBCD, i get "cannot load bootstore". I get the same error if I run bcdedit from cmd.

Something is clearly amiss, I also notice that system > advanced > startup shows nothing, (no default OS, no other OS) in either win 11 or win 10 parition,

I'm wondering if anyone can suggest a way I can repair my boot record so that I can do upgrades / updates, or whether there is a way to migrate to a GUID patition system without data loss?
 
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Failing updates has nothing to do with dual boot, especially if you save the setting of where to boot from in the bios.

Easybcd can only work fully with MBR, under UEFI/GUID it will be very restricted.

If your bios is set up for uefi (easybcd not working) and your partitions are MBR then as said above you are in for a lot of frustration.
 
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Just to report back - I took the first piece of advice and essentially started again.

Interesting to note, it wasn't possible to restore two partitions directly from backups, although it should be in theory... in fact it did seem to work but 2nd OS (win 11) had some very odd behaviour, including no wi-fi at all - i.e. no icon in network area at bottom right, and network reset both via windows and command line did not work. Also, never had this before, but windows wanted to open all txt docs with registry, despite choosing notepad!
Anyway, win 10 partition restored fine which was the one I didn't want to lose, and have now done a fresh install of win 11 to the second partition and all running fine, managed to upgrade to pro and get updated fully.
Macrium reflect did a pretty good job and their docs/ old forum posts explain things pretty well, so I was able to set up proper partitioning for GUID scheme, then restore boot record using the macrium usb PE environment.
Only thing I had to do manually was restore the OS choice boot screen, something along the lines of ' bcdedit /set {bootmgr} showbootscreen true ' in cmd.exe - wish I could remember the exact syntax, I should have noted it down!
Before I got the boot choice screen sorted, I was using the partition choice in BIOS to get into each OS... and noticed that the old problem of hanging on a black screen before booting into whichever version of windows was happening again. This went away once I got the boot screen working so can only conclude it was a symptom of that.
 
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