Thursday, April 29, 2010

Windows 7 Home Premium Install - Boot Manager - cannot verify digital signature punch to the face

My Vista Business edition decided one day to corrupt itself and not allow it to perform Windows updates. After various possible solutions I found online, no success, and not wanting to perform the Microsoft "solution" of reinstalling Vista, I got a Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade to bypass the issue completely.

First thing I learned, Home Premium cannot upgrade directly from Vista Business edition. Second thing, boot managers are a pain in the ass when they don't work correctly.

The Situation:

I have a single OS system with 3 hard-drives, each with a single partition. The main hard-drive is a 320GB (really 300 GB because stores lie...) Western Digital. The other two are just for storage.

So, after booting from the Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade DVD and installing over Vista, it booted into Windows 7 just fine. (This was with the Windows 7 DVD still in). Weirdly whenever I booted with the Windows 7 DVD in, it would boot just fine; otherwise I got the following error:

File: /windows/system32/winload.exe

Status: 0xc0000428

Info: Windows cannot verify the digital signiture for this file














No matter what I tried, this boot manager error would show up if I didn't have the Win7 DVD in. Solutions I tried that didn't work were (in no particular order)
  • VistaBootPro tinkering
  • Pressing F8 and choosing the Harddrive to boot off of
  • changing the BIOS Hard-drive boot priority
  • bootedit -set nointegritychecks ON
  • physically unplugging my other hard-drives
  • doing a Windows 7 repair (Startup Repair, bootrec shenanigans)
Eventually, this is what I did as a solution:

  1. Saw that I had two harddrives set to Active partition (oops) and so I set the extra one to inactive using Diskpart [could be an optional step due to next step disconnecting]
  2. I shutdown and disconnected my two extra hard drives' SATA cables
  3. I booted up using the Win7 DVD and went into Repair the installation
  4. I did a Startup repair of which now recognizes that the boot manager was corrupt and fixed it
  5. Rebooted the computer, removed the Win7 disk and saw it boot properly
  6. Shutdown, reattached extra hard-drives and still worked fine

All is well in my Windows 7 world now and I'm really quite pleased with it.

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