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My laptop came with pre-installed Windows 7 and I do not have a recovery DVD nor a Windows installation disk.

On boot the laptop says that BCD is missing. To recover I'd normally need a Windows installation disk. Does downloading a trial edition of Windows 8 and recovering affect my license ?

Chintan
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  • You can't use your mistake to "upgrade". Besides you probably DON'T want win8 anyway. Take a look at this question: http://superuser.com/questions/78761/where-can-i-download-windows-7-legally-from-microsoft – Tyson Oct 19 '14 at 00:27
  • There may also be a recovery partition on your hard drive. – Tyson Oct 19 '14 at 00:30
  • Yes there is a recovery partition. But it too says that boot partition missing. Is there a solution ? Besides I don't want to upgrade. I just want to use bcdedit to edit the BCD. – Chintan Oct 19 '14 at 00:36
  • Yes; It matters; Why use Windows 8 when you can download and burn an Windows 7 .iso? Its even a Superuser question. – Ramhound Oct 19 '14 at 00:39
  • Yeah okay. I just picked up Windows 8 because if I try to recover with some lower version of Windows it doesn't work. It has to be the same or a higher version. – Chintan Oct 19 '14 at 00:43
  • The repair features, like for example startup repair, on Windows installation discs do not affect your existing installation's license. As @Ramhound has indicated there are official sources you can download Windows 7 isos from if you'd prefer it. – Robin Hood Oct 19 '14 at 01:32
  • The problem with using Windows 8 is that the WinRE version is different. Its not entirely a problem with 8.1 because the tools are more or less the same. – Ramhound Oct 19 '14 at 02:45
  • So does that mean I can use Windows 7 to recover without affecting my license? By recover I mean using the bootrec.exe to restore my BCD. – Chintan Oct 19 '14 at 02:49

1 Answers1

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You don't have to use bcdedit. It would be to complex.

As you want to use a Windows 8 trial version for recovering BCD

you can use bcdboot.exe to repair/fix Windows BCD file.

Rewriting boot related files should not affect license.

snayob
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