.LOG file that can't be read

I have one fixed disk with nothing but Windows 7 installed, and a second
hard disk partioned to D:/E:/F: I just discovered a directory named
\Boot on the D: drive with three files, BCD, BCD.LOG and BCDBAK. I tried
to open BCD.LOG with both Notepad and Wordpad, but it's mostly non-ASCII
characters that display as gibberish.

What the hell kind of .log file is machine code? And what does the
mysterious directory signify?


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--------------------------------------------
Dick Baker
(contact via http://goon.org/contact.php)

On 6/30/2014 9:37 PM, Dick Baker wrote:
I have one fixed disk with nothing but Windows 7 installed, and a second
hard disk partioned to D:/E:/F: I just discovered a directory named
\Boot on the D: drive with three files, BCD, BCD.LOG and BCDBAK. I tried
to open BCD.LOG with both Notepad and Wordpad, but it's mostly non-ASCII
characters that display as gibberish.

What the hell kind of .log file is machine code? And what does the
mysterious directory signify?



My guess is this.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...=ws.10%29.aspx

Dick Baker wrote:
I have one fixed disk with nothing but Windows 7 installed, and a second
hard disk partioned to D:/E:/F: I just discovered a directory named
\Boot on the D: drive with three files, BCD, BCD.LOG and BCDBAK. I tried
to open BCD.LOG with both Notepad and Wordpad, but it's mostly non-ASCII
characters that display as gibberish.

What the hell kind of .log file is machine code? And what does the
mysterious directory signify?

Try the equivalent of "Start : Run : diskmgmt.msc",
which is Disk Management dialog.

Disk Management has some labels for the partitions:

"System" = boot files, like winload.exe, the BCD binary file, and so on...
"Boot" = system files (typically the thousands of files on C

What you want to make sure of, is Disk Management is applying
neither of those labels to D:.

In addition, the "System" thing should also be marked "Active",
as that is the boot flag traditionally used by Windows (but not
Linux). By convention, one of four primary partitions is supposed
to have that, and as a marker as to what partition contains
bootstrap files.

Windows 7 comes in two-partition or one-partition installs. A
proper one-partition install, would be "System,Boot,Active" all
on the same partition (typically C: if nothing funny happened
during the install).

A two-partition install, the SYSTEM RESERVED partition (no drive
letter assigned) is "System,Active", as it has /Boot and friends.
The C: partition would be "Boot" and have Pagefile and other
assorted junk. A two-partition install is compatible with Bitlocker
full disk encryption. With Bitlocker, you can encrypt all of C:,
because the unencrypted bootable files are on SYSTEM RESERVED.
That's why they split them into two.

But putting stuff on a "D:", that's some kind of accident.
It almost sounds like a BCD repair script ran amok and
put stuff on the wrong partition. The "bcdedit" program has
many options, and maybe it has options to put files in places
you don't really want them.

And Windows does do "binary" log files. The CHKDSK log files
in System Volume Information are binary, and you're not supposed
to be reading them there. The actual log is in Event Viewer
for CHKDSK, and there it is in text, in some kind of winlogon
event. Exactly how you're supposed to know that .log contains
binary and is unreadable, only Bill Gates knows for sure :-)
Maybe they ran out of file extensions to use :-)

Paul

Bob I wrote in :



On 6/30/2014 9:37 PM, Dick Baker wrote:
I have one fixed disk with nothing but Windows 7 installed, and a
second hard disk partioned to D:/E:/F: I just discovered a directory
named \Boot on the D: drive with three files, BCD, BCD.LOG and
BCDBAK. I tried to open BCD.LOG with both Notepad and Wordpad, but
it's mostly non-ASCII characters that display as gibberish.

What the hell kind of .log file is machine code? And what does the
mysterious directory signify?



My guess is this.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...=ws.10%29.aspx

Well, most of that is over my poor head, but it appears that whatever
BCDBoot does, it does it on the system partition (or one of the system
partitions if there's more than one), making me think that, as Paul
suggested in his response, BCD got confused and dropped some files on a
pure data disk. Renaming that directory and rebooting had no obvious
effect, so I'll just delete them.

--
--------------------------------------------
Dick Baker
(contact via http://goon.org/contact.php)