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BCDEdit lets you edit, add and delete boot options for Windows (10/11).

Doing the work to understand UEFI I found good video explaining the big picture of UEFI and two videos explaining how to fix the efi partition.

However, neither of these videos show a system with multiple drives. Following a post on SU, I found this command for BCDEdit, bcdedit /enum all which shows both of my drive's efi partition data. How is this possible since the BCD data is installed in a partition on each drive.

Please confirm if BCDEdit does indeed work to identify and manage all connected drives.

xtian
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2 Answers2

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bcdedit works with two separate things at once, depending on options given: it can either show you the BCD data stored in the file or it can show you the EFI NVRAM variables transformed into a BCD-like format. For example, if you do bcdedit /enum firmware, that's the list of your Boot#### EFI variables – obtained without touching the BCD much.

So if you do /enum all, you get both the BCD entries for the current system drive and the firmware entries – but not BCD entries from unrelated other drives.

grawity
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Yes, a single BCD can contain entries pointing at multiple installations of Windows, across multiple disks. For example, if you have a windows "Recovery" partition, that will have its own entry in the BCD too, even if it's located on a separate disk.

Each drive that is "bootable" will have its own BCD store. The "Current" BCD will be whichever one is getting booted by your motherboard BIOS, so it's important to know that editing the current BCD on one disk will not update it on others if there are multiple.

If you want to view/edit the BCD on a different disk, you can use: bcdedit /store Z:/boot/bcd /enum. Without /store <path>, it defaults to the current system BCD.

Cpt.Whale
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