Win11 EDU GER boot error "\EFI\BOOT\BCD"
Greetings!
Sorry to bother with that, but this drives me mad....
We are currently setting up the auto installation of Win11 using E2B. For this we have ISOs of Win11 EDU 23H2 for both english and german. I copied the menu entry in the startup_menu.txt of the 2nd partition as well as the unattended xml and just replaced the ISO file name. So both entries should be equal.
We already installed both language versions on several different machines a couple of times. But now we received a Lenovo ThinkCentre M70t Gen3 which causes trouble.
Now the fun part: The english ISO starts flawless while the german version stops with this error. I googled about that error and found posts about \EFI\MICROSOFT\BOOT\BCD. So - naive as I am - I copied the BCD from \EFI\BOOT\ to \EFI\MICROSOFT\BOOT\. No change.
I also tried to use the 1.73bBeta, which helped me once in the past, but no luck here. I also tried older ISOs 22H2, but still: English works, german fails. So long I only got the german ISO running using the same files via Ventoy and going there using F5 -> CTRL+W and picking the ISO and the XML manually. That's the current workaround, but I hate the menu. The agFM menu is so much better and I'd really love to get it running here as well.
If important, I applied the following settings in the BIOS:
- Disabled Secure Boot
- Disabled USB and HDD delay
- Deleted the pre-installed EFI keys (this helped me once with Win10 installs)
- Disabled FastBoot (this helped me once with Win10 installs)
Also, I managed to to start the german ISO manually using (.isodef) but here I can't pick an unattended XML. (.isowin) and "Boot Windows PE" both fails.
Any help would be appreciated. Many thanks in advance. =)
Hi
If the English version of the ISO works, why not make a copy of it and then replace the \sources\install.wim/esd file with the one from the German ISO?
Maybe because I never thought of that neither tried it. I will take a look into that. Thanks a ton for the suggestion! =)
OK
Are these ISOs official versions from Microsoft?
I thought MS provided multi-edition ISOs which contained Edu amongst other Editions but not a specific version just for Edu?
i.e. Have the ISOs been 'made' by someone other than MS?
I'm convinced they are from an official source since I'm working at a university having a country wide MS license contract.
The original filename of that ISO was "SW_DVD9_Win_Pro_11_23H2_64BIT_English_Pro_Ent_EDU_N_MLF_X23-59562.ISO"
Speaking of versions: The ISO of 22H2 (which also didn't work) offered several versions like Pro, Home, EDU,... For that ISO I had to use /IMAGE/INDEX "3" for the EDU in the unattended XMl. This ISO of 23H2 only offers EDU, which is why I had to change the /IMAGE/INDEX to "1".
(ridiculous) Update: We received three additional machines which are the exact same model and we also applied exactly the same BIOS settings. Both languages installed flawlessly on all machines.... -.-
I'd consider this problem being solved while moving it in my "mysterious_crap"-folder...
Again thanks a lot for your fast replies! =)