Total identified Windows installations: 0

[Peter_Fish]

Running windows 10, 64 bit on a dell laptop (inspiron 14z), this was an upgrade from win8 which I did quite a while ago, I removed all traces of win8. The other day I needed to test a usb drive with the standalone windows defender app on it that I was trying to run on another machine. I went into my bios and changed the boot to legacy to get the usb to boot, after testing I switched the bios back, but my computer wouldn't boot. After trying the built in windows repair stuff and poking around online and I found lots of similar advice relative to fixing the BCD (eg, https://www.evernote.com/shard/s570...7aa006b6894c/d0a58c3996b85f424c903bd6087bbada ), but none of it has helped at all.

The key problem identified seems to be the bootrec /scanos command comes back with Total identified Windows installations: 0. But the instructions listed above did not fix the problem. I've struggled to find any other advice on what else to try.

My laptop uses UEFI, drives are GPT. When I list volumes within diskpart I get volumes 0 through 6.

0 is cdrom drive
1 is OS, NTFS
2 is ESP, FAT32
3 is winretools, NTFS
4 doesn't have a label, NTFS
5 is PBR image, NTFS
6 is DIAGS, FAT32.

All are listed as healthy, volumes 2 through 6 are listed as hidden. Volume 1 has nothing listed under info (seems like it should say boot, but it's not clear if that is necessary or not).

I've tried using the bcd from my ESP partition back to c:\windows as per the instructions above, it all runs with no errors, but at the end of it when I do bootrec /scanos it still says no windows installations.

Does anyone have any suggestions please?

Thanks
Peter

 

[Saltgrass]

The identified Windows installations refers to those not already contained in the Boot Files. Showing 0 is normal unless you have a second installation.

UEFI installs do not like FAT 32 partitions unless it is the system. Is #6 your USB drive on an additional partition created on the Primary Drive?

If it is a USB, remove it. Go into the bios and make sure the Windows Boot Manager is set to primary boot device.
A Bios have many different ways of being set up. The UEFI and Secure Boot are not always the same setting. Make sure you have at least UEFI selected and Secure Boot if it is a different setting.