Question Powered down ASUS PN50, won't boot now (C: & D: drive swapped)

[JKohl]

Powered down my ASUS PN50 miniPC before going away for the weekend to find it wouldn't boot with a 0xc0000034 error. After checking everything, I notice while in diskpart that the boot drive is no longer the C: drive...

vol 0 - C: - "STORAGE" - NTFS - Primary Partition - 930G
vol 1 - D: - "BOOT" - NTFS - Primary Partition - 475G
vol 2 - *no letter or label* - FAT32 - System - 100M

All are healthy and I *think* that the bios battery died and reset the boot...?
At any rate, how do I get D: and C: swapped back, or get it to start booting on C: again?

Thanks ahead of time....

Cheers!

JK

 

[USAFRet]

Please show us a screencap of the Disk Management window.
(upload your pic to imgur.com, post the link here)

 

[JKohl]

 

[USAFRet]

I meant Disk Management, not cmd diskpart.

 

[JKohl]

Here you go, USAFret...oh, and so am I!

 

[JKohl]

Sorry, not sure how to run diskmgmt from a boot disk...?

 

[USAFRet]

Is this one physical drive with several partitions, or multiple physical drives?

Generally, whatever drive it boots from and has Windows will be the C.
The usually small boot partition may indeed live on a different drive.

 

[JKohl]

According to diskpart ("list disk"), there are 3 disks. I believe this command lists physical disks, but someone can correct me if this is wrong. Disk 0 is the 931G "Storage" disk, while Disk 1 is the 476G "boot" disk. Infuriatingly, for some reason the BIOS does not show multiple options to boot from...only one.

 

[USAFRet]

According to diskpart ("list disk"), there are 3 disks. I believe this command lists physical disks, but someone can correct me if this is wrong. Disk 0 is the 931G "Storage" disk, while Disk 1 is the 476G "boot" disk. Infuriatingly, for some reason the BIOS does not show multiple options to boot from...only one.

Right.
There would only be the drive with the boot partition listed.

The actual Windows can live on a whole different physical drive.
This happens when you install the OS with more than one physical drive connected.
The 'boot partition' ends up on the 'other drive'.

Ignoring drive letters, does the system actually boot up?

 

[JKohl]

Only to the point it throws the 0xc0000034 error...so no, not really

 

[JKohl]

Let me add a little more context as well...so in researching the error, I found the MS page describing what appeared to be a corrupted boot sector/boot files. When attempting to use the tools and the manual instructions to fix that, nothing worked. That's when I noticed that the C:/D: were swapped from what they were prior to the shutdown. Which made me wonder, did the boot sector repair fail because it wasn't the correct boot drive, or for some other reason? That's what got me to wondering if swapping the C:/D: back could be done and would it fix it.

I knew how to do all these kinds of things years ago, it's part of what I did in the USAF, but I've not messed with OSes for a looong time.

 

[USAFRet]

Let me add a little more context as well...so in researching the error, I found the MS page describing what appeared to be a corrupted boot sector/boot files. When attempting to use the tools and the manual instructions to fix that, nothing worked. That's when I noticed that the C:/D: were swapped from what they were prior to the shutdown. Which made me wonder, did the boot sector repair fail because it wasn't the correct boot drive, or for some other reason? That's what got me to wondering if swapping the C:/D: back could be done and would it fix it.

I knew how to do all these kinds of things years ago, it's part of what I did in the USAF, but I've not messed with OSes for a looong time.

Ignore the drive letters, especially if booting from a rescue USB.

There is a procedure to create the boot partition on the drive that holds windows. But I am not the expert here in that.
Possibly @SkyNetRising will chime in with exactly how to do that.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I knew how to do all these kinds of things years ago, it's part of what I did in the USAF, but I've not messed with OSes for a looong time.

Can you show command output of following:

diskpart​

list disk​

select disk 0​

list partition​

select disk 2​

list partition​

list volume​

​

General procedure for fixing BCD error 0xc0000034 is

reformatting bootloader partition​

recreating bootloader files.​

You have to find, which partition is bootloader partition - either 100MB or 625MB partition
(most likely 100MB partition is bootloader).
Assign letter to it - for example letter H:
Format it - for legacy boot system to NTFS, for UEFI boot system to FAT32. Currently 100MB partition is FAT32.

format H: /fs:FAT32​

Then create bootloader files on it

bcdboot D:\windows /s H:​

For UEFI system may need to specify UEFI

bcdboot D:\windows /s H: /f UEFI​

​

Resulting message should be "Boot files created successfully".

 

[JKohl]

Thanks to both of you, SkyNet & USAFRet....that was it. I think what may have happened before was that crucial piece of info you had about not worrying about the drive lettering when booting from a USB. That threw me. I also might have been on the wrong drive attempting to fix things...which didn't work of course. This time everything worked, and I'm writing this from the PC. Thanks for all the help!

Cheers!

JK