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BOOT Genius, not TROUBLESHOOTING genius.
And it has NO “genius”, it depends on YOU to decide what to do, it does NOT analyze a non-booting drive and report on and fix what’s wrong.
However, this appears to be a useful tool nonetheless if you have a computer that does not boot anymore and want to fix it yourself without simply reinstalling the operating system from external media or from the hidden section of the drive by using hot-keys during boot to select “reset to factory defaults” equivalent, if available.
This presumes you have 2 computers, one to build the booting-tool, and the computer that does not boot.
The computer that builds the booting-tool could be the same computer, just remember to build the booting-tool first, before the computer fails and refuses to boot!
I WISH:
— I wish this tool would work from a working computer onto an attached second hard drive so I could fix booting issues “offline”, and while attached, also look at the drive with a variety of other tools, not just this one.
— I wish this worked on UEFI Unified Extensible Firmware Interface drives for those folks I support who get a new UEFI computer, get stuck, and need my help before I have had a chance to rebuild their computer as “legacy”. Since this mentions MBR Master Boot Record, I presume that this does not work on modern, secure UEFI drives … one reason I reformat drives to be NOT UEFI, but “legacy” instead, since there are more tools to service legacy drives than there are tools to service UEFI drives.
— I wish this tool were automatic, inspecting and reporting the failures it finds, and offering to back them up so that any attempted repairs can be reversed, and then offering to “fix” the problems, rather than expecting us to diagnose what’s wrong and then blindly whacking our drive with “fixes” such as rebuilding sectors and clusters and replacing supposedly missing exe and dll files and whatever ( the files might be there, just hidden or unpermissioned ), when those may not have been the problem, and those may have been custom implementations by Dell or whomever and were working but just did not a match this repair-tool’s expectations — if our drive had problem ( a ) and we whack it with solution ( b ), will we make our unbootable drive irretrievably worse?
So, thanks for letting us test this, I’ll let you know if it’s useful on a current challenge: a Windows 10 computer ( “legacy” boot ) that boots but has no fonts, no information under icons, no information in menus, but the fonts directory is there, so I presume it’s a permission problem in the directory structure or in the registry … maybe this is not the tool to help resolve that since this computer does boot … but a more naive user might try this tool anyway, and so, so will I.
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