Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Paul wrote:
One thing to note:

The black page with text, is chain loading. It does not
care what the last OS booted was. You select an OS and
(chain) loading starts immediately.

The tile based fancy GUI menu, is not chain load. You will
hear the BIOS beep and the machine will go through POST
a second time, if you select the non-default OS. Thus the
tile based fancy GUI is a loser. This is one reason I have
the black page with text loaded on mine. Efficiency.

Thanks, Paul. Think I had noticed when I got the OS start up page that
allowed the choice that it re-booted.

So I'll just leave it as is. 99% of the time I'll use Win10. Was more a
nice to have than must have to use Win7 and XP.

Spoke too soon. Today, it booted straight into Win10 without showing the
black page. I don't understand how Easy BCD works - it seems to write to
each boot file on every HD.

So I changed the BIOS to boot from the Win7 SSD. And there was the black
page with the choices, all of which load the OS you select.

Tried it a few times during the day and seems to be solid. So with no
understanding of what's happening, will just leave it as is. ;-)

Only minor niggle is the black page has the OS not in the order my OCD
wants, (goes Win7, Win10, Win XP top to bottom) but that's OK as it boots
from Win10 if you do nothing.


You can get "bcdedit" to tell you about the menu
stored in any BCD file. Without arguments, bcdedit
will likely be looking in C:\boot\BCD .

bcdedit /store C:\boot\BCD # Look in the OS partitions, not the data ones...
bcdedit /store D:\boot\BCD
bcdedit /store E:\boot\BCD

If you have two hard drives, you can do BIOS directed boot,
and select OSes on the various hard drives. This is how
you can have "two different results" while booting - it's
done by the BIOS being inconsistent about which disk
it selects.

When you do that, you could be accessing the BCD on a different
drive letter, in which case, the presence of the black screen,
the listing of boot candidates, can be different.

It's possible, if you dump the current menu, you'll see
that the printout in Command Prompt, roughly follows
the menu entries in the black window. Could you change
the ordering ? I presume so, but I've not wasted the
time trying it :-) I'm not one of those people who
"makes everything pretty" on a computer. I'm pretty lazy.

Paul