I made a mistake by trying to enable secure boot on my PC, even though I knew my boot drive doesn't support it. I disabled CSM Support and turned on secure boot, which caused my startup to show just a white underline. I tried several fixes, but it eventually changed to a "bootmgr is missing" error. I plugged in my Windows 10 installation flash drive and used the command prompt to run "bootrec /rebuildbcd", but it showed that my installation was on the wrong drive (D instead of C). I continued anyway but then got an error saying "the requested system device cannot be found", forcing me to restart. Now I'm getting "the boot configuration data for your PC is missing or contains errors" when trying to boot from the flash drive. Is there a way to fix this myself at home before I have to take it to a repair shop?
3 Answers
First off, don’t panic! Your PC isn't bricked; it just needs some bootloader tweaks. Start by resetting your BIOS settings to something standard. Set the Boot Mode/OS Mode Selection to UEFI, turn off Secure Boot for now, and enable CSM Support, especially if your SSD uses MBR. Make sure the USB drive is at the top of the Boot Priority list. You might need to toggle CSM on and off to see if that helps your USB boot.
Also, your flash drive could be corrupted or not set up properly. Use a working PC to re-download the Windows 10 ISO from the Microsoft site and create a new bootable USB using Rufus. Set the partition scheme to GPT and the target system to UEFI. Once you have that ready, boot from it again, and use some commands to fix your SSD's bootloader. If you run into "Access Denied" issues, there are workarounds to get around that too. Just be patient and follow the steps carefully!
Another approach: disable secure boot and re-enable CSM. Sometimes you may need to restart after each step to apply the changes properly. If that doesn't work, you might need to use the MBR2gpt tool to convert the C: disk to GPT, but be warned, it can be tricky and not always effective in every case.
Side note: this guy said he sold me fent behind a parking garage, and it’s true; I was there!
When I tried "bcdedit," it said "boot configuration data store could not be opened" and "the requested system device cannot be found." Also, the filesystem for my SSD and the other drives is NTFS.