How to Rebuild the BCD in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, or Vista
Rebuilding the BCD in Windows should only take around 15 minutes: If rebuilding the BCD didn’t solve the problem you were having, continue troubleshooting to fix freezing and other issues that may prevent Windows from booting normally. On Windows 7 or Windows Vista: Start System Recovery Options. The bootrec command will search for Windows installations not included in the BCD and then ask you if you’d like to add one or more to it. Option 1 Option 2 If you see Option 1: Move on to Step 7. This result most likely means that Windows installation data in the BCD store exists but bootrec couldn’t find any additional installations of Windows on your computer to add to the BCD. That’s fine; you’ll just need to take a few extra steps to rebuild the BCD. If you see option 2: Enter Y or Yes to the Add installation to boot list? question, after which you should see The operation completed successfully, followed by a blinking cursor at the prompt. Finish up with Step 10 toward the bottom of the page. The bcdedit command is used here to export the BCD store as a file: bcdbackup. There’s no need to specify a file extension. The command should return the following on screen, meaning the BCD export worked as expected: What you just did with the attrib command was remove the hidden file, read-only file, and system file attributes from the file bcd. Those attributes restricted the actions you could take on the file. Now that they’re gone, you can manipulate the file more freely (specifically, rename it). Now that the BCD store is renamed, you should now be able to successfully rebuild it, as you tried to do in Step 6. It should produce this in Command Prompt: This means the BCD store rebuild is progressing as expected. You should see this on the screen to show that the BCD rebuild is complete:
