Fix and Restore Windows 7 Boot Screen That Changes to Vista Style

Sometimes, the beautiful, elegant, high resolution animated and dynamic Windows 7 boot screen UI may be changed to or replaced with Windows Vista boot screen, normally when user adds a Windows 7 entry in boot menu or accidentally when user attempts to repair the startup menu items with Windows Vista DVD, specifically Startup Repair. Windows Vista boot screen is a boring black background with low resolution green running progress bar.

The invalid and wrong boot screen for Windows 7 is due to missing locale entry in boot record, which failed to be set when editing or rebuilding the BCD. When locale is not found, Windows boot loader does not know which boot locale folder to look for the animated bootscreen. Thus, in order to fix the boot screen so that the boot screen can be reverted, restored or reseted back to original animated Windows 7 boot screen, just run one of the following commands in elevated command prompt with administrator rights:

bcdedit /set {current} locale en-US

or

bcdboot %WinDir% /l en-US

Change the en-US to the language version of the installed Windows 7, such as ja-JP, de-DE, es-ES, pt-BR, zh-CN, zh-TW, fr-FR, fi-FI and etc.

Restart the computer after running the command to see the new boot UI (user interface) be used again. To check if the locale setting has been entered properly, just run the bceedit command in command prompt that runs as administrator.


17 Responses to “Fix and Restore Windows 7 Boot Screen That Changes to Vista Style”

  1. johnny
    November 19th, 2009 07:27
    17

    bcdboot %WinDir% /l en-US worked for me

  2. Blind EAGLE
    November 18th, 2009 12:14
    16

    by the way those commands didnt work for me at all.
    i installed my win7 from my dvd at labtop toshiba by upgrading from vista and the logo work.
    my friend has the same copy and install win7 beside win xp (multiboot)and guess wat , the logo working.
    i install it at my pc as clean install and i have that silly red dot
    my friend buy different copy of win7 and install it clean install and he see red dot as me even so my pc and my friend had higher specs than the labtop and the other pc.
    so wat i found from this mess is that if u install win7 clean installation u will get stupid red dot.
    the logo is so cool it desirve to work hard for it

  3. Blind EAGLE
    November 18th, 2009 12:02
    15

    i think i somehow fix that
    i was have that red dot at start up (which refer to the start of the animation ) then by chance i was installing daemon tools lite ,daemon must first install that old driver (SPTD or something)then restart pc then i found the animation appear for first time but not completed it hang before it finish (its better than nothing huh)
    so u just install that stupid app “daemon tools lite (mine was v4.304) and enjoy the animation or at least part of it
    lol

  4. Martin
    October 26th, 2009 15:16
    14

    I think I found something as MS seem to be limited display size during boot up when I plugged DVI HDMI from PC to 40″ LCD TV and it was Vista old green bard at 1280 x 720 so that may cause problems and i take off and plug the DVI <. D-SUB (can work DVIDVI) at 1024×768@50mhz that bought back the Win 7 own logo. I noticed my own system as the boot up was 1024×720 and then change to 1920×1080p when the Log-on screen came up so think its the display size that MS may have limited for Win 7 logo and if detect large display size then it will change to Vista green bar as the BCDedit cannot do anything about – you need is change the display size during boot up which recommend is 1024×720.

    I got it back all right as I spend 2 days to find it. if you use HDMI or more than display size which MS limited then you wont get Win 7 Logo bootup screen

  5. unruled
    October 20th, 2009 06:08
    13

    win7 recovery disc (RTM) gave me a vista bootloader.. really weird. :/

  6. alex
    October 17th, 2009 00:39
    12

    this did not work for me…. vista boot screen sucks

  7. Espen
    September 25th, 2009 18:48
    11

    “bcdboot %WinDir% /l en-EN” (English) worked for me, thank you very much!!!
    My issue was that I had a completely black splash screen, but the command I mentioned fixed it! Thanks!

  8. Andrew McNaughton
    August 16th, 2009 18:21
    10

    This will not help people who have a boot resolution of less than 768 horizontal lines. Microsoft decides to limit the animation to a fixed minimum boot resolution of 1024×768. So if you have a modern widescreen display at 1280×720 during boot then you will be excluded from the new boot animation party and will see the fugly Vista earthworm. Sometimes I just think Microsoft engineering is full of people with learning difficulties and social disfunctions. They also seem to be stuck in a timewarp where it’s still 1999 where they are.

    I use an HDTV as my main display and unfortunately my VGA card’s BIOS has it boot at 1280×720. It isn’t until the proper VGA driver loads that the resolution goes up to 1920×1080 and that’s after the boot animation.

    I hope someone discovers how to hack this limitation. There must be a file or registry entry which controls this and surely we’ll be able to tweak it.

  9. GIuliano
    August 13th, 2009 16:29
    9

    it doesn’t work…
    Tried both commands in elevated mode but nothing happens, nothing…

  10. Ryan
    June 4th, 2009 01:31
    8

    I used the “bcdboot %WinDir% /l en-US” worked beautifully that windows server 2008 startup is so bland, windows 7 is gorgeous. Thank you sir!

  11. balance
    May 29th, 2009 10:23
    7

    worked like a charm

    had problem with windows 7 boot up
    used the vista repair cd and windows 7 loading screen was like vista

    thanks

  12. Raiden
    March 26th, 2009 08:15
    6

    is there any way to repair the boot screen without being able to boot windows 7. I have Win XP and Windows 7 on the same computer and i tried to install a custom boot screen. Now it wont boot. ohh and to top things off i dont have the iso for Win 7 anymore (installed it wiht flash drive).

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    5

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  15. Chris
    February 20th, 2009 00:46
    3

    Again, further to my last comment. Its hit and miss.

    I’ve lost the Windows 7 animation again.

    I’m wondering if its just not possible to keep the animation on a dual boot system? Seems to remove it for whatever reason.

    This is on my Samsung NC10 netbook by the way.

    Thanks.

  16. Chris
    February 20th, 2009 00:05
    2

    Further to my previous comment, I stand corrected. It took THREE restarts, but it did actually work. Applied first command, and restarted. No change. Applied second command, and restarted. No change. Restarted again – voilà!

    Many thanks.

  17. Chris
    February 19th, 2009 23:49
    1

    This did not work for me. Tried both commands. Ran Command Prompt elevated to administrator. Thanks for trying though.

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