During installation in Win7, by pressing F8 key advance boot option comes from which we can enable debugging mode. During installation in win8.1 and win10, on pressing of F8 key, advance boot option is not coming. Is there any key to bring it?
Installation media have a \Boot\BCD file that is the store that contains the medium boot options edited with BCDEDIT.EXE.
I do extract the content of installation media into a hidden partition located at the very beginning of the disk. This installation medium is not read-only and, when booted, a CMD.EXE prompt can be used to repair an installed OS. Once the command prompt is running, BCDEDIT.EXE can be used to edit the medium boot options.
You could also extract the DVD or ISO image content into a dedicated directory, edit the \Boot\BCD content and then rebuild the ISO image and burn it again. Don’t forget to make the newly created ISO image bootable.
To me the best option is to extrract the ISO image content into a USB stick, edit the boot options, make the USB stick bootable and finally boot the machine with the USB stick.
Are you familiar with Microsoft ADK ?
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/windows-assessment-deployment-kit
I have already tried 2nd method, extracting the OS image, modified the BCD store to enable debug and then copied it to a bootable USB. In this case, debugging is enabled in the OS installed but not in the installation setup which runs from USB. But in my case, i would like to enable debugging to debug my driver which is loaded using “LoadDriver” option using setup.
Let me check the 1st method which you suggested.
Setup.exe actually has a parameter for enabling kernel debugging during setup. If you run “setup.exe /debughelp” you can get more information. Specifying these debug parameters to setup will enable debugging when setup reboots the system.
I’m not sure if this will enable debugging for the first reboot into the Safe OS, or only for post-Safe OS, but you shouldn’t need to debug the Safe OS stage anyway.
Alok, from your post it sounds like you edited the BCD file in the extracted OS image aka WIM file. You only need to edit the BCD file in the \BCD folder in the root of the ISO image. When viewing the entries of the BCD, you’ll see they refer to setup and not the Windows installation.
Andrew,
We have tried launching Windows 8.1 installation using “setup.exe /debug:1 /baudrate:115200”. In this case, debugging is enabled for the OS which is getting installed. But we are not able to debugging the initial installation phases. Also i could not execute setup with “setup.exe /debughelp”.
Mahmoud,
Thanks for your reply. I have extracted the OS image, modified the BCD store [Drive:\boot\bcd] to enable debug and then copied the files to a bootable USB. In this case, debugging is enabled in the OS installed but not in the installation setup which runs from USB.
Update:
When i enabled debug in the bcdstore in : Drive:\efi\microsoft\boot\bcd, debugging is enabled during setup. Thanks for your support.