New system drive boots fine but issues with Win7 backup, etc

0

I've decided to post here to see if anyone has any ideas about this before I go any further.

Recently I installed a new SSD drive to replace my old SSD drive as the Windows system/C: drive. After a round of using a combination of Macrium Reflect Free (for cloning the system drive) and EasyBCD (to set up the boot partition on the new drive) things seemed to be working fine.

However, after my first attempt to use Windows backup about a week later I found that I could not and got the familiar 0x80070002 error with the "The system cannot find the file specified" message without the filename.

Upon more research I found that the filename is not specified because backup is presumably looking for boot configuration data in the "System Reserved" partition.

After investigating various ineffective solutions, I found other suggestions that led me to find initially that the "System Reserved" partition was not online. This particular post seemed to list symptoms similar to my issue: Windows Backup fails with 0x80070002: "The system cannot find the file specified". I found that

  • bcdedit fails with the error "The system cannot find the file specified" when run from an admin command prompt
  • the msconfig Boot tab is empty and non-functional
  • The list of operating systems in the System Control Panel Advanced tab is empty
  • Windows Backup fails with 0x80070002

I ended up using 'diskpart' to set that partition online but that did not work. Further suggestions online pointed to the fact that the "System Reserved" partition should also be hidden so I changed the partition type ID to '0x17' from '0x07' to make it hidden. Again, that did not work either and I reverted the partition back to '0x07'.

The last thing I tried was a suggestion in a post elsewhere to repair the boot configuration. I started with 'bcdboot c:\windows /s c:' but this gave me an error as follows: "BFSVC: Failed to open handle to resume object. Status = [c0000034]"

(At least I think it was "to resume object" -- in any case the error code was the same.)

So I am now stuck not willing to go further for fear of screwing up my PC. The current state of that drive using 'diskpart' output is as follows:

Disk ### Status        Size    Free    Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 2   Online        931 GB  1024 KB

DISKPART> select disk 2

Disk 2 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> det disk

Samsung SSD SCSI Disk Device
Disk ID: 5C2EEFB2
Type : SATA
Status : Online
Path : 0
Target : 4
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : PCIROOT(0)#ATA(C00T04L00)
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : Yes
Pagefile Disk : Yes
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : Yes
Clustered Disk : No

Volume ### Ltr Label       Fs    Type       Size    Status    Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 3   B   System Rese NTFS  Partition  100 MB  Healthy
Volume 4   C               NTFS Partition   931 GB  Healthy   System

DISKPART> select vol 3

Volume 3 is the selected volume.

DISKPART> det vol

Disk ### Status        Size    Free    Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
* Disk 2 Online        931 GB  1024 KB

Read-only : No
Hidden : No
No Default Drive Letter: No
Shadow Copy : No
Offline : No
BitLocker Encrypted : No
Installable : Yes

Volume Capacity : 99 MB
Volume Free Space : 70 MB

DISKPART> list part

Partition ### Type             Size    Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
* Partition 1 Primary          100 MB  1024 KB
  Partition 2 Primary          931 GB  101 MB

DISKPART> det part

Partition 1
Type : 07
Hidden: No
Active: Yes
Offset in Bytes: 1048576

Volume ### Ltr Label       Fs    Type       Size    Status    Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
* Volume 3 B   System Rese NTFS  Partition  100 MB  Healthy

DISKPART> select part 2

Partition 2 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> det part

Partition 2
Type : 07
Hidden: No
Active: No
Offset in Bytes: 105906176

Volume ### Ltr Label       Fs    Type       Size    Status    Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
* Volume 4 C               NTFS  Partition  931 GB  Healthy   System

Also, here are some select details from the BIOS setup for the ASUS Z170-P;

SATA ports

  • SATA6G_3: Samsung 850 EVO 25GB (Disk0 / G: -- called Linux SSD but it only contains a Linux VM image)
  • SATA6G_4: Seagate ST1000DM 1TB (Disk1 / E: and I: (yes I know poorly partitioned ))
  • SATA6G_5: Samsung 860 EVO 1TB (Disk2 / system drive)
  • SATA6G_6: Maxtor 6L250R0 250GB (Disk3 / F: (old drive))

The new 860 EVO replaced the 850 EVO as the system drive.

There is also an external Seagate backup drive connected to one of the USB2.0 ports.

Boot priority - Windows Boot Manager (SATA6G_5 Samsung 860 EVO) - Seagate Backup+ Desk SH04 (not sure why -- USB device as boot option?) - SATA6G_5 Samsung 860 EVO

SATA mode selection: AHCI

Note that when I was installing the new drive, I had a DVD drive that I disconnected from the SATA port to allow me to connect the new system drive (and left the DVD drive disconnected because I wasn't really using it anymore).

Everything else is working fine. Just the items listed above (backup, bcdedit, msconfig, etc.) are not working. I'm not sure but this might also impact restore points as well, I haven't checked.

In any case, if anyone has any ideas on how to fix this it would be much appreciated.

Thanks, Darko

windows-7
hard-drive
boot
ssd
system-reserved-partition
asked on Super User Feb 3, 2019 by DLisak

1 Answer

0

Well months later and this has finally been solved.

I continued to have no problems using the PC except for the original issues that I stated at the beginning of the thread. However, a recent set of Windows updates triggered a bad situation. After the updates were applied, the usual restart had to occur. When the restart began the bootup phase, I got the error 0xc0000428 "Windows cannot verify the digital signature of this file".

This left me in a state where I could not get past the boot manager. In the BIOS everything seemed OK except for multiple duplicate boot device entries some of which had different boot behaviour (some would try to boot into my new SSD, some appeared to try and boot using my old drive). In any case, I tried using the Windows 7 installation drive to use Startup Repair. Initially it could not do anything because it did not see an operating system installed -- even though when I tried looking for drivers to load in that screen it could see all of the drives including the one with Windows installed on it. Even bootrec /scanos returned nothing.

Later I tried disconnecting all but the Windows drive. I found using diskpart that the drive was not active as the boot drive so I set it to be so. Then, when trying the bootrec /scanos, it ended up finding an OS. I then proceeded with the other bootrec commands to try and repair the boot config. However, it still wasn't successful on bootrec /rebuildbcd (something about the device not being found or something -- can't remember now).

Finally, after some more frantic searching on the web, I stumbled upon a post that sounded quite similar to my bootup issue. I did notice that the Windows boot partition was labelled D: while the System partition was labelled C: The magic formula that fixed it then became:

> diskpart
> select vol d
> active
> exit
> bcdboot D:\Windows /s D:
> bootsect /nt60 all /mbr

After the restart and selecting the right boot device in the BIOS to boot from, I finally got Windows to start up. After setting the BIOS boot order correctly and re-attaching the rest of the drives I was able to get everything back up. And the rest of the issues at the beginning of this thread were finally corrected. (You wouldn't believe how close I was to re-installing...)

I hope this post might help others with this extremely frustrating problem.

answered on Super User Oct 6, 2019 by DLisak

User contributions licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0