Newer HP and Dell laptops cant boot Win PE
It seems like laptops made the last 2 years by HP and Dell just cant boot a WinPE image anymore, products like Hirens 11, Macrium PE rescue image, and others. Using machines like HP 1040 G9, G10, 860 G8.
agFM boots, and allows me to select something like Clonezilla and boot up (much slower than past experience), if I pick a Macrium image, any of the PE modes or the first option, begin booting windows, and eventually fail often with an error that the BCD is corrupt, sometimes it just reboots without any error about 5 seconds after the selection is made.
Using Ventoy - just never boots the ventoy environment, it throws an error something like this:
alloc magic is broken at 0x890aeXXX: 891349XX Aborted. Press any key to exit.
I can boot a trusty old Optiplex 7060, it boots anything - anyway you like and very fast.
On my HP bios I have disabled every single BIOS security feature I could find, no difference.
I also tried the agFM alternate uefi boot loader bootx64.efi, no change.
Using latest E2B 2.21, with all the components updated.
There are many ways in which a system can boot and it depends on the firmware/BIOS in that system.
Typically x86 compatible computers can boot in one or two of three modes:
- Legacy/BIOS mode
- UEFI x64 mode
- UEFI x32 mode
Most PCs use either 1&2 or just 2.
So it is CRITICAL when reporting an issue to state what mode your PC is booting in.
If it boots in legacy mode, the E2B grub4dos menu system will be loaded.
If it boots in UEFI64 mode, agFM will be loaded and the menu will have a (UEFI 64-bit) at the top of the first menu.
Ventoy will show characters in the version string - e.g. BIOS or UEFI (for UEFI64) or IA32 (for UEFI32).
So please be clear about what exact ISO you are booting and what exact BIOS type/mode you are using on each PC.
In the case of a Ventoy USB drive, please state the version number. alloc magic broken error may be due to a theme if you have used one.
Have you tried a different USB storage device?
Thanks for responding Steve,
All these machines only have uefi 64 I am pretty sure, there is no bios/csm option.
I am using fresh E2b 2.21, flashed last night, with all the latest component updates, not sure what version of Ventoy you use, but it downloaded the latest yesterday, I booted Ventoy manually from the UEFI boot menu, from the Ventoy folder. Also have older E2b 2.19, same results.
I am using the current Hiren's BootCD PE x64 (v1.0.8), which is based on Win PE11, or also older Hirens Win10 PE. I have used a Macrium iso which is Win 10 PE. Aomi iso, not sure on its version.
I have seen posts on the ventoy theme issue, but I have not changed the theme from the default. I have downloaded the latest stable Ventoy 1.1.05 on one of my USB, no change. I have also tried a stock Medicat USB with various versions of Ventoy, including latest, and behavior is identical - Ventoy just never loads.
I have tried 4 different quality USB, Samsung, PNY, NVME-USB. They all work flawless on older PCs in UEFI64 mode, and I have been experiencing this issue for over a year, I initially thought an update might come out in the future to address it, so didnt want to bother anyone with bleeding edge hardware, but now these machines are 2 years old, they have latest BIOS updates, and still same issue. Mainly,
Can you try connecting the E2B USB drive to a USB 2 port or connecting it via a USB 2 cable?
Also try different USB ports, esp. the rear ones.
Ok, I narrowed it down... Hirens base on Win10 PE starts loading, sits for ~2 minutes, eventually crashes with a blue screen something about boot record failure. I had a earlier build of Hirens based on Win11 PE that was doing something similar, but the behavior was slightly different, it would sit for 2~3 minutes on a black screen, no spinning windows circle... but I switched to their latest Win11 build and it actually booted in to windows!!
So at this point it seems Ventoy has definitely been broken for a long time, as previously they had a beta build CI release that specifically addressed the alloc magic and worked, then at some point (possibly bios version related) that CI quit working also. H2b 2.21 uses 1.0.97, and I updated to ventoy 1.1.05, still broke, as I and others have reported on their site.
I realized from months ago this had nothing to do with E2B or Ventoy, it is just constant manufacturer changes that keeps breaking things.