04-07-2019, 10:31 PM
I owe firenice03 in particular - and anybody else reading this thread - an update report on this problem.
I'm pleased to say it is solved..... thought I still don't know the specific cause of the original problem!
Long story short - since the issue was clearly either a Win7 problem or something to do with Lenovo and its recovery setup, I sought help from those directions. The Lenovo forums were pretty useless. But I got a lot of advice from "sevenforums" , a comprehensive site unconnected with Microsoft.
Much of that advice involved exploring the BCD using the terminal, or 'command prompts' in Windows. I harvested a lot of information (like there were three BCDs on the system...). But none of the suggested solutions worked: many commands simply produced error messages. It proved effectively impossible to edit the BCD using the bcdedit range of commands.
I had been fighting shy of trying any of the "automatic" boot-repair programmes, figuring that they might make the situation worse. But when the various attempts to modify or restore the BCD to 'normal' via Win7 got nowhere, I eventually decided to try the tools and options within the EasyBCD program.
And what joy! Simply choosing the "Repair BCD" option in EasyBCD magically put everything right. It amended the customised entries in the Boot Manager and Boot Loader, did away with the peculiar "Boot Normally or Restore Image" screen, and on reboot resulted in a perfectly normal bootup process with the familiar sequence of screens and the ability to boot smoothly into either Win7 or Linux.
I still don't know what was wrong with the BCD or who modified it and why. But suffice to say that I now have a perfectly normal dual-boot setup working as it should; and my respect for EasyBCD (which I use to dual/multiboot all of my computers) has grown considerably.
So all's well that ends well - and thanks again to those who joined in the discussion here.
I'm pleased to say it is solved..... thought I still don't know the specific cause of the original problem!
Long story short - since the issue was clearly either a Win7 problem or something to do with Lenovo and its recovery setup, I sought help from those directions. The Lenovo forums were pretty useless. But I got a lot of advice from "sevenforums" , a comprehensive site unconnected with Microsoft.
Much of that advice involved exploring the BCD using the terminal, or 'command prompts' in Windows. I harvested a lot of information (like there were three BCDs on the system...). But none of the suggested solutions worked: many commands simply produced error messages. It proved effectively impossible to edit the BCD using the bcdedit range of commands.
I had been fighting shy of trying any of the "automatic" boot-repair programmes, figuring that they might make the situation worse. But when the various attempts to modify or restore the BCD to 'normal' via Win7 got nowhere, I eventually decided to try the tools and options within the EasyBCD program.
And what joy! Simply choosing the "Repair BCD" option in EasyBCD magically put everything right. It amended the customised entries in the Boot Manager and Boot Loader, did away with the peculiar "Boot Normally or Restore Image" screen, and on reboot resulted in a perfectly normal bootup process with the familiar sequence of screens and the ability to boot smoothly into either Win7 or Linux.
I still don't know what was wrong with the BCD or who modified it and why. But suffice to say that I now have a perfectly normal dual-boot setup working as it should; and my respect for EasyBCD (which I use to dual/multiboot all of my computers) has grown considerably.
So all's well that ends well - and thanks again to those who joined in the discussion here.
