Windows – How to set the location of the BCD system store for bcdedit

bootwindowswindows 8.1

I am using a machine that dual boots windows 8.1 and OSX using the chimera boot manager. The disk layout is MBR so there is no EFI partition, the boot files can be found on C:\boot. When I try to use bcdedit in the command prompt I get the following error:

C:\Windows\system32>bcdedit /enum
The boot configuration data store could not be opened.
The system cannot find the file specified.

However if I manually specify the bcd location (which is at c:\boot\bcd) everything works fine, I can edit the store, and the changes gets picked up the next restart just as expected:

C:\Windows\system32>bcdedit /store c:/boot/bcd /enum

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
(...)

So it seems bcdedit doesn't know where the system store is. Is there a way to fix this? It might also be helpful if I'd known where bcdedit tries to find the system store in the first place.

Best Answer

Edit: this does not solve the original user's dual-boot issue. But this page was one of the first Google hits for my bcd-not-found issue, so others may find it useful if they're simply trying to fix their BCDedit behavior.

It appears that bcdedit, by default, attempts to load the BCD store from the active partition. You can use diskpart to modify which partition is active.

So I'd do diskpart like: diskpart list disk select <your disk number> list partition select <partition number that includes your boot/BCD file> active exit bcdedit Hopefully that last bcdedit will find your BCD store.

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