Bootable device not found windows 7
An EFI boot manager utility
Status: Beta
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Hi all,
I installed refind on my computer after having already installed winsows 7 with bootcamp. Then followed up by installing manjaro linux.
I can boot into both osx and manjaro with no issue, however whenever I try to boot into windows, I get a bootable device not found error and then I can't do anything, no prompt or anything else to interact with.
I can't even boot from a windows install drive because it gives me the same error....
What can I do to try and solve this ?
In the end I wound up installing windows 10 from a thumbdrive and now I can boot into all 3. Didn't really care about the data I had on there.
I would still be interested in a method for debuggin this though,
At this point I can only guess at what happened. My guess is that you installed Windows 7 in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode, which would have involved the creation of a hybrid MBR. These are ugly, dangerous, and tricky things to manage, but they're necessary to dual-boot BIOS-mode OSes on Macs alongside macOS. When you installed Manjaro, it would probably have replaced the hybrid MBR with a legal GUID Partition Table (GPT), which would have rendered Windows unbootable. When you installed Windows 10, that was probably in EFI mode, which would work with a GPT, so the original problem went away.
If my guess is correct, then you could have recovered Windows 7 to bootability by re-creating the hybrid MBR; however, there are potential pitfalls with that approach. Having everything booting in EFI mode is a better option. The last I heard, it was next to impossible to get Windows 7 booting in EFI mode on a Mac; but later versions of Windows work better in EFI mode on Macs.
Sounds plausible thanks!
So I guess the update was for the best.