It seems that more often than not, when I restore a computer, I encounter stop code 7B or worse, just a white-on-black message that no OS was found.
The internet is full of advice on how to handle this. I wanted to post a couple of the more helpful links with comments.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you restore using Essentials 2016 recovery media, at least if you are restoring to a virtual machine, it wants to create an MBR (non UEFI) system. GPT is off and you will need to use a Generation 1 Hyper-V VM to get the recovery media to boot. (A good reason to move away from Essentials as a backup solution.)
This Tom’s Hardware page is a good place to start. It quickly points out that the Macrium Reflect recovery media can quickly repair boot problems, and in fact that did work for me recently. But I wanted to be able to do it “manually” as well. For that, the link to the Microsoft article Advanced troubleshooting for Stop error 7B or Inaccessible_Boot_Device is helpful. While it looks complicated, it’s actually fairly straightforward in terms of a step-by-step approach, and is one of the few articles I saw that explains recovery from both MBR and UEFI boot issues.
The one thing the Microsoft article doesn’t explain is how to format the EFI partition to start from scratch. This article helped with that.
In the end, I think this is what got me back in business on an MBR virtual machine restored from an Essentials backup. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK and only if you have a way to restore again!
1. Use diskpart to determine which is the SYSTEM/EFI partition. Assign a drive letter if necessary. Format it as FAT32. For example, I had a 50MB partition with letter C: and a 149GB partition (containing a Windows folder) as letters D:. So I ran format c: /FS:FAT32.
2. Re-create the boot configuration database: bootrec /rebuildbcd. I’m not sure this is required if you’re continuing to bcdboot.
3. Use bcdboot to recreate the boot files. This is slow! Bcdboot D:\windows /s C: /f ALL Per Microsoft, “The ALL part of the bcdboot command writes all the boot files (both UEFI and BIOS) to their respective locations.”
By the way, before starting that, I ran bootrec /fixmbr, which seemed to work, and bootrec /fixboot, which always failed with “Access is denied”. I’m not sure either of these is helpful.
It took quite a while for the machine restored to a VM to boot as it updated drivers etc., but it did eventually come up.