Hey everyone, I'm having a really frustrating issue with my new build. My buddy and I have been putting together a PC with Windows 10, using an ASRock B760 Pro RS/D4 motherboard, an Intel i5 12400K, and two 1TB Seagate SSDs. We were attempting to switch from legacy BIOS to UEFI, following some suggestions to convert the drive to GPT to make everything work properly. However, that's when things started going downhill.
We got a message saying there wasn't enough unallocated space on the SSD, so we followed some steps to remove the recovery partition to free up space for the conversion. We managed to convert the drive and got a confirmation message to restart. Unfortunately, now the computer won't boot at all. We received a BCD error, and while trying to boot from the SSD, the BIOS isn't even recognizing the drive anymore.
We created a bootable USB with Rufus and Windows 10, which allowed us to boot from it, but none of the repair options helped. We turned to the command prompt where we've been struggling ever since.
To give you an idea of our attempts, using bcdedit returned an error about the boot configuration data store not opening. The command 'bootrec /rebuildbcd' didn't recognize any installations, and while 'bootrec /fixmbr' worked, 'bootrec /fixboot' gave us an access denied error. We even tried renaming the GPT partition letter as suggested, but nothing has changed. We're really stuck, and any help would mean so much!
1 Answer
It sounds like you're in a pretty tricky situation! Unless you specifically need to use UEFI, a clean install of Windows can sometimes be the quickest fix. You could wipe the drive, letting Windows create the necessary partitions automatically during installation. Also, as a side note, since support for Windows 10 is ending, why not go ahead and install Windows 11 instead if you get it up and running? It's free to upgrade and better optimized for new hardware!
That's exactly what I was thinking—clean installs are often the way to go! But was the intention to upgrade Windows? Wouldn't that help too?
Absolutely, I'd happily switch to Windows 11 once we sort this out!