Looking for a comprehensive/"expert" guide to BCD parameters
- by Stilez
I'm interested in educating myself about BCD on Windows 8. There are many, many "walkthrough" guides" and "howtos", but I can't find any guides at typical "enthusiast" level covering what each option or argument in a BCD /ENUM dump might mean, and the principles governing how these all work together.
Imagine trying to rebuild or debug BCD (including EFI/BIOS variants and recovery/hibernate/memtest sections, and perhaps multiple boot Windows/WinPE/WinRE) from scratch using just BCDedit + DiskPart, and trying to understand rather than just copy/pasting commands. That's roughly the knowledge I'm after.
Example questions might be:
How is a BCD /ENUM dump to be read, item by item? How do its sections work together? (A lot of guides only show a specific example rather than explaining all the all common args that can exist and what they mean, they don't actually explain how sections work together, or they assume MBR/BIOS/Vista/7 and omit info needed for EFI/GPT/Dynamic disks/8)
Partitions are specified by volume letter or as a \Device\HarddiskVolumeNNN. Why does it sometimes show these items as a letter and sometimes as a GUID? What are the practical differences if any?
What exactly is syntax like "ramdisk=[C:]\Images\winpe.wim,{ramdiskoptions}" saying, and how will the drive letter "C" be interpreted at runtime in a line like this? Is the drive in such a line always "C:" (most examples assume so) and if not, when wouldn't it be?
Many websites state that an sdi device and path may be needed in some sections of BCD, but what is sdi and what are these args doing when they appear?
How does the GUID to HDD volume/partition mapping work under EFI/GPT? So that if disks or partitions/volumes change it's clear how one can confirm from basic principles whether data shown in BCD /ENUM ALL is still correct or not.
Does anyone know of a suitable reference source for this kind of raw BCD data and structures? Thanks!
