Welcome to PCWizKid’s Tech Talk. Today, I wanted to show you this easy BCD utility that I got. It’s a Gooey Boot Entry Manager that allows you to modify the entries on your Boot Loader. Now here in NeoSmart.net you can download from NeoSmart Technology this free utility. I've been using it for a long time now and I thought I’d mention it to you guys because many of you are looking for something to manage your Windows Vista and XP dual boot machine or maybe you’ve got Windows 7 with Ubuntu or another operating system. So go ahead and download this. Check it out because this is a very easy utility to use and actually it’s quite powerful as well.
I'm going to run the latest version here so you can see that it’s very simple. There is a couple of options in here that allows you to tweak the boot entries of your boot loader. So for example if you have Windows XP and Vista both installed on different partitions right now and you wanted to modify the order in which they load for example on the boot menu instead of having XP first and Vista second or Vista first and XP second. You can change that around by going in here and modifying those entries. So it’s very simple you're just going to change settings which one is a default OS that you want to show when it first boots up and gives you the menu XP or Windows Vista.
So obviously you have to have XP or Windows Vista installed first and then after that you install this utility and then you can modify the order and how much time the menu stays there you know by default is 30 seconds. You can make it 15 seconds right and you can even add more options to the boot menu as well. You can modify what it says on it. You can add additional entries as well, so let's go into add and remove entries here. So for example if you have a dual boot machine and you’ve got the Windows Vista boot loader and it shows you the two operating systems but you have also Linux installed but it’s hidden from view. So Windows boot loader doesn’t know you can actually use this utility to add another entry for different operating system that you might have also installed and maybe you have it dual, triple boot whatever and it’s not on that menu.
Well, this utility allows you to add and point to the master boot record, the boot sector area on the drive where the operating system information is. So for example if you have Ubuntu there is the grub menu and there is the grub boot record there you have for Ubuntu and you can specify which partition it’s installed on and then add that entry in there so now when I boot up the machine for example instead of just seeing the Windows XP and the Vista option I will see now the Linux option, the NeoSmart Linux option. Of course, you can rename that to whatever it is that you want but here quickly shows you after we booted just I took a quick snapshot to give you an idea here, right.
And also the order right, you can switch the order which this things appear. So that way if it defaults in 15 seconds to boot up on operating system it boots up into one that you want. More options in here of course that you can go ahead and tweak, some of these are advanced setting so if you're not sure yet about dual booting how to manage menus and things like that well you maybe want to stay away from this right. This is more for folks that are doing testing on different operating systems and want to debug and check for things.
Maybe you’ve got problems with boot loader and you want to reinstall or get it back to the original settings and for some reason your Vista disappeared from the menu and you just have XP or maybe when you installed the Ubuntu or another operating system, certain things on the menu disappeared, so you can try to get things back right and rescue them basically by using this utility as well. So this is another reason to use this, not just to modify things that are working fine but also to try to rescue and repair things that have basically been either erased, removed when you installed another operating system and now it’s no longer there on the menu.
So it’s a little bit tricky. I mean there are different scenarios and obviously there is too much to really go through to try to fix every single problem but obviously they’ve thought about this the easy BCD folks who’ve created this and know that there are potential issues when you installed different operating systems and you might want to restore things. So that’s why it gives you the option there and the diagnostic. So very nice little utility and if you're looking into modifying your boot loader this definitely is the best program to do it and I hope you enjoy this video and thank you for watching.
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