Hi,

Have an old P4 PC which has ancient software linked to old hardware that needs to be referenced occasionally. There are issues with it due to C: drive filling up. I need to resize the partitions with GParted or similar but first I need to take an image with Macrium.

The system is a Sony Vaio PCV-C11M.

I have downloaded Macrium 32 installer to a Generation 1, 32-bit Windows 10 Hyper-V VM and used Rufus to make a bootable USB. When it tried to boot I get the following:

File: \Boot\BCD

Status: 0xc000000e

Info: The Boot Configuration Data foryour PC is missing or contains errors.

Not sure why it is referencing BCD / UEFI when obviously I am trying to avoid that. Does anyone have any advice? How can I take a Macrium image of this old P4 machine?

Thanks.

+x

 

PC01 - 24 August 2020 10:19 AM

Hi,

Have an old P4 PC which has ancient software linked to old hardware that needs to be referenced occasionally. There are issues with it due to C: drive filling up. I need to resize the partitions with GParted or similar but first I need to take an image with Macrium.

The system is a Sony Vaio PCV-C11M.

I have downloaded Macrium 32 installer to a Generation 1, 32-bit Windows 10 Hyper-V VM and used Rufus to make a bootable USB. When it tried to boot I get the following:

File: \Boot\BCD

Status: 0xc000000e

Info: The Boot Configuration Data foryour PC is missing or contains errors.

Not sure why it is referencing BCD / UEFI when obviously I am trying to avoid that. Does anyone have any advice? How can I take a Macrium image of this old P4 machine?

Thanks.

For the most part you can't boot UEFI on a 32 bit OS.  Some older tablets and a wonky laptop allows it once in a while, but normally UEFI is reserved for booting a 64 bit OS on a 64 bit processor.  So that may be the issue, you are trying to UEFI boot and you need to MBR boot.  So you need to change Hyper-V to try and boot to the recovery media via MBR. From a Brief Google it appears that newer V2 VMs on Hyper-V won't allow that.  Is the OS you want to backup a VM as well?  Or you simply used a VM to create the 32 bit Macrium Recovery media? 

As far as what I see, I don't see anything referencing UEFI, just BCD which is part of Windows boot system, it's the Boot Configuration Data, or in this case media created with a Windows utility. Have you tried to boot the Hyper-V VM directly from the ISO instead of a USB?  This is the easiest way.  Create a ISO file of the recovery media and copy the ISO file to an area on the VM Host where you set it as the bootable media as a DVD.  That is IF the OS you wan tot back up is a VM as well. 

If the OS you want to back up is NOT a VM then I think Rufus is not building the recovery media correctly.  If the P4 machine is a physical machine and it has a DVD you should use the VM to create an ISO and then use a software like ImgBurn to write the ISO to a disk and boot off that. And you need to boot off the Rufus created media via MBR not EFI.  

You don't need 32-bit Reflect to create 32-bit Rescue Media, and Hyper-V doesn't allow you to "attach" USB devices to VMs, so building a bootable flash drive entirely in a VM would be challenging.  You'd want to generate an ISO in the VM, copy it out somewhere else, and use Rufus elsewhere to turn that into a bootable flash drive.  That said, if you can't even get the Hyper-V VM to start, then it sounds like you have a larger issue that has nothing to do with Reflect.  You'd need to provide more information about your VM setup if you really need that resolved. (EDIT: Ok, after re-reading, it sounds like that's the error you get when trying to boot the actual system.  That wasn't entirely clear based on your wording of your post.)

If you already have Reflect installed somewhere else, just use that to build the desired Rescue Media build.  Open Rescue Media Builder, go to Advanced, set your Base WIM to WinPE 3.1, and set your architecture to 32-bit.  Click OK, and choose to build.  Reflect will download the necessary WinPE package from Microsoft, and you're done.  Assuming that P4 system even supports boot from USB, that is....

Lastly, there's no such thing as "BCD / UEFI".  Those are not interchangeable terms or even especially related terms.  BCD stands for "Boot Configuration Database", and it is related to the Windows Boot Manager, which is used for both Legacy BIOS and UEFI systems, and has been since Windows Vista.  So you can have a BCD error even if you aren't booting in UEFI.

If you can't get your P4 system to boot even from Rescue Media that's using WinPE 3.1 32-bit -- again, check those selections because using 32-bit Reflect does NOT necessarily create 32-bit Rescue Media, and it won't necessarily select WinPE 3.1 either, which you might need for such an old system -- then another option would be to physically remove the drive from that VAIO and connect it to a modern system using a SATA to USB adapter (or maybe even a laptop IDE to USB adapter??), in which case you could capture an image of that drive from Reflect running on that more modern system.  Those types of adapters are pretty easy to find and not very expensive if you don't care about getting a powered adapter, which you wouldn't need for a 2.5" laptop HDD.  (Unpowered adapters also work for SSDs.)

Thanks for your replies.

I understand I can't ordinarily boot UEFI on 32 bit systems. I should have been clearer, I'm trying to create Macrium Rescue boot media that boots in BIOS / legacy mode. As mentioned I have tried the various PE options, the oldest ones, but I can't see anywhere that specifically pertains to creating the Rescue media for BIOS/Legacy/CSM or UEFI. It seems that everything I try still creates boot media for UEFI based systems.

Rootman:
- The resulting Macrium Rescue isos all contain what looks like the contents of UEFI boot media (efi folder)
- I am just using a (Gen 1, meant to be BIOS style system firmware) VM only to create the Rescue media. I went down this road as I thought, if Macrium runs on a BIOS based system firmware, it might create the rescue media accordingly. The VM / Hyper-V has no further involvement other than me trying to use a system that is BIOS based in order to create non UEFI Macrium boot iso.
- The P4 machine does have an optical drive but it is dead, and by that I mean I have looked into it at some length and I think the controller on the board may be faulted. It's not possible to use it and not necessary to go into detail here. The P4 will boot from USB (Ubuntu for example) just not Macrium (yet).
- Of course I am choosing MBR when I create the media in Rufus (indeed it is the only option available from the dropdown). Despite this, it still contains files required for efi boot. I'm not saying that this is wrong, maybe Macrium writes the data for both BIOS and UEFI style booting into the iso.

jphughan:
- As mentioned above, I tried to use a 32bit BIOS based VM to see if that would work as all else failed so far. Not sure why you are quoting 'attaching' USB devices to VMs in Hyper-V, I never mentioned that, maybe because I was generally unclear.
- 'Open Rescue Media Builder, go to Advanced, set your Base WIM to WinPE 3.1, and set your architecture to 32-bit.  Click OK, and choose to build.  Reflect will download the necessary WinPE package from Microsoft, and you're done.' - Exactly what I am doing, won't boot.
- I didn't mean BCD  and UEFI were interchangeable, should have said BCD w/ UEFI.
- Physcially removing the drive and taking the Macrium image or clone may well work but I would have to find an IDE adapter, haven't had one for years but yes, I could try that.

Thanks.

You don’t have to select anything specifically for BIOS/CSM-compatible Rescue Media because currently, Rescue Media Builder won’t allow you to make Rescue Media that DOESN’T support BIOS booting, even if you build it on a UEFI system. You can either make BIOS-only or BIOS/UEFI Rescue Media, not UEFI-only. All WinPE/RE versions that Rescue Media can build with support BIOS booting, and the flash drive itself should as well, as long as it’s initialized as MBR rather than GPT, using either a FAT32 or NTFS partition, and the partition containing the Rescue Media files is marked as active. And Rescue Media Builder takes care of all of that if you use it to create your flash drive. Having an EFI folder doesn’t mean that BIOS boot support isn’t available. It just means that UEFI support is ALSO available.

If it’s still not booting, some older PCs have trouble booting from certain flash drives, especially high capacity flash drives (defined as greater than 8-16 GB here), so that could be the issue.

The Hyper-V comment was based on your post saying you’d downloaded Reflect into a Gen 1 VM and were trying to use Rufus to create a flash drive. Rufus within Hyper-V won’t do much if you can’t attach a flash drive to the VM.

If you’d like, below is Macrium’s own article for how to prep a flash drive for Rescue Media, although again Rescue Media Builder should be ensuring the flash drive is properly configured all on its own. Have you tried booting this flash drive on any other BIOS-based PC?

Link: https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=7736778#content/view/7736778