Can't Boot Into Original OS After Dual Boot Configuration
Feb 23, 2012
I recently added a hard drive to my computer (SSD), and installed Windows 7 x64 onto it. The result being a dual boot system, which by default boots to the SSD, and optionally (by Windows Boot Menu), can be booted to the original drive (standard mechanical drive).
Initial setup went fine, however I decided to customize the Windows Boot Menu, so that logical names could be associated with each operating system instance. To do this I used EasyBCD and I altered the names in the Windows Boot Menu from: Quote: Windows 7 Windows 7 to... Quote: Windows 7 - SSD Windows 7 - Standard Drive Shortly after the modification I noticed that I was no longer able to boot into the original OS. Instead I was being presented with a "Repair Windows" option. Figuring that my EasyBCD "tampering" may have had something to do with the issue I decided to change the names back to "Windows 7" in the Windows Boot Menu. However doing so had no positive impact on boot up of the original OS.
After booting again into the original OS I accepted the "Repair Windows" option, and then left the computer over night to do it's "thing". After completion of the "Repair" the situation has deteriorated -
* Windows doesn't load (the same as before)
* Windows doesn't present a "Repair Windows" option (it did before)
* The computer reboots a short period after the "Starting Windows" screen is presented
As a side note the drive is in good health, and all data on it can be read from within Windows 7 when I boot to the SSD OS.
I recently added a hard drive to my computer (SSD), and installed Windows 7 x64 onto it. The result being a dual boot system, which by default boots to the SSD, and optionally (by Windows Boot Menu), can be booted to the original drive (standard mechanical drive).
Initial setup went fine, however I decided to customize the Windows Boot Menu, so that logical names could be associated with each operating system instance. To do this I used EasyBCD and I altered the names in the Windows Boot Menu from: Quote:
Windows 7 Windows 7
to... Quote:
Windows 7 - SSD Windows 7 - Standard Drive
Shortly after the modification I noticed that I was no longer able to boot into the original OS. Instead I was being presented with a "Repair Windows" option. Figuring that my EasyBCD "tampering" may have had something to do with the issue I decided to change the names back to "Windows 7" in the Windows Boot Menu. However doing so had no positive impact on boot up of the original OS.
After booting again into the original OS I accepted the "Repair Windows" option, and then left the computer over night to do it's "thing". After completion of the "Repair" the situation has deteriorated -
* Windows doesn't load (the same as before)
* Windows doesn't present a "Repair Windows" option (it did before)
* The computer reboots a short period after the "Starting Windows" screen is presented
As a side note the drive is in good health, and all data on it can be read from within Windows 7 when I boot to the SSD OS.
I'm having trouble with my very new computer (Lenovo Y480 with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit), which I've narrowed down to the following sequence:
1. I restored computer to original factory settings (to rule out possible causes)
2. I ran msconfig, and checked the boxes 'Safe Mode' and 'Networking.' I got the following error message:"System configuration cannot save the original boot configuration for later restoration. Boot changes will be reverted. The system cannot find the file specified"
3. The default boot option disappeared from the boot menu (Windows 7, default OS, current OS).
4. When I restarted my computer, it would not boot and gave me the error 0xc00034, stating that the file BootBCD was missing.
I did not do anything else with my computer after restoring the factory settings, and I did not connect to the internet. I originally encountered the problem when I wanted to try installing Windows updates in safe mode after some of the installations failed. I have replicated the error several times, including after successfully installing all Windows updates.
I have a windows 7 x64. I separated 40 gb my disk and installed windows 2008 R2.But my boot info did not change. How can i add my new OS in my bcdedit? (I need exact commands)
I originally stated out with XP Pro and then installed Win 7 in a separate partition with dual booting. Now I want to get rid of the XP OS and recover the partition the XP OS is in for other uses.
Running bcdedit shows the the Win 7 as drive C and XP as drive D. The master boot record, I am guessing, in is drive D.
So how do I get the master boot record into the Win 7 partition so I can delete the partition containing the XP OS?
i have a new work laptop with xp sp3 on it. I want to install w7 64 bit as a dual boot, but only have 1 physical drive. i cannot remove my current installation as it is pre-build from work, but can partition the drive etc. However on trying to install w7 64 bit I get a message saying cannot install windows 7 on efi drive with mbr, not gpt. Can I do what I want without screwing up my xp installation?
I installed Windows 7 on a partitioned harddrive with vista on the other half. After the installation i have my boot menu with:Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows vista still works but when i try and load windows 7 i get a boot error message
Last night I installed Windows 7 (x64) on a separate partition.
Anytime I had tried this in the past, using Vista, it always detected the Windows XP partition, and gave me a boot menu with "Earlier Version of Windows" option to boot to.
This is not so with Windows 7.
How can I get the boot menu to show both options, to boot to XP or to Windows 7?
I have dual boot with Xp and windows 7.when i log into my Xp all the restore points being deleted from windows 7.when i check the disk management information in 7 it shows windows 7 create a logical drive with my Xp primary drive.even i am hide the drive from both windows means Xp drive from windows 7 and vice verse.So i like to unmount or remove the drive partition of windows 7 from Xp and Xp primary from windows 7.So that they dont affect each others system files with being deleted the partitions.
I have been dual booting for about 6 months now with no problems.I installed XP first and then Windows7.When I boot the computer it goes to Windows7.It gives me the option on the screen to choose other operating system which I do.All of a sudden I can't get into XP,it just stays a black screen.So I booted back to 7 and checked the boot menu and only Windows7 is listed,don't know why,it was working fine till now.Is there anyplace on the computer where I can get my original boot menu back.
i have an acer aspire notbook with vista home premium original and fully licend by manufacture.. now when i installed windows 7 ultimate and activated it.. the boot menu become like this
windows 7 ultimate (recovered)
windows vista home premium (recovered)
now when i start windows 7 it starts with vista green bar not with windows 7 new logo..
how can i get back the original menu without the word (recovered) , and for sure get the windows 7 logo back .. with the activation validated with it.
I installed opensuse 12.1 on dual boot along with my other windows 7 installation. Installation of opensuse is successful and i can use it. But when I tried to use windows 7 on grub, it says bootmgr is missing. I've already encountered this problem a long time ago so i tried to use bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /rebuildbcd and bootrec /fixboot in the recovery console in the windows 7 DVD. Rebuildbcd and fixboot did not work and it said something like it cannot find my windows installation. I also tried bootrec /scanos, it returned a windows installation on D:\Windows but my windows is in drive C. I think this has something to do with me messing up the active partition in disk management a month ago but i already fixed it by setting the active partition to the system reserved partition. Only fixmbr is successful, but now i can't boot on any OS because it says: Missing operating system.I also tried bcdboot C:\Windows but it failed with a message that goes like: Failure when attempting to copy boot information..
I was having win 7 RTM and i tried to installl OSx86 in second hard disk
after few failure i successfully installed OSx86 in my secondary had disk now the problem is that i cant boot win 7
i changed boot order i tried windows 7 disk repair
but both failed
im getting some Boot mldr missing...
Actually even OSx86 is not booting i get OSx86 boot screen with two hard disk to select if i select windows disk it still says the same Boot mldr missing.
I can't get Win 7 to boot after setting up dual boot (Ubuntu 10.10) on my GF's laptop. I'll describe the problem and everything that has been tried so far. REALLY hoping somebody has an idea, I'm getting desperate.I installed Ubuntu last night via the Live CD. Used the Live version to install alongside Windows and partition the drive, install Grub, etc. At reboot, after POST it would just go to a black screen with a flashing cursor. I could only run off the live CD. A forum member determined the Grub was trying to load from the wrong partition. We changed that and voila! Grub now loads properly. I can boot into Ubunto via Grub with zero problems. HOWEVER: when I try to boot into Win 7 from Grub, it just locks at the same flashing cursor of death screen. The 7 partition is till intact, I can see and access all the files on the 7 partition from within Ubuntu, however 7 will not boot. I have tried downloading and burning the Win 7 repair disk and doing all of the following,Running the automatic Start Up Repair - several times. All it does is remove Grub, but booting still goes to the flashing cursor and I have to reinstall Grub again to be able to do anything after POST.I have used the command prompt to run "bootsect /nt60 SYS /mbr". Has the same effect as above.I have used all the bootsec.exe /fixmbr, /fixboot, and /rebuildBCD commands. Again, all have the same effect and I have to reinstall Grub to get anywhere.I don't have an installation disk to try and just do a repair install because Asus apparently doesn't feel that I would need one of these. All I have is the recovery disks from the Asus AIRecovery application that want to just re-format the entire drive and start over. This isn't an option. It's my GF's laptop (mine gave up the ghost last week) and we both have WAY too much highly important data on here. Not to mention she would castrate me . Now from all my research the only other thing I've come across that sounds possible is that the boot flag needs to be set to a different partition. Somebody had a somewhat similar problem and it turned out the way Dell set up the system the boot flag had to be moved to a recovery partition and it worked fine. I'm wondering if Asus has something similar going on, but I can't figure out how to move the boot flag. I'm going on 12 straight hours of working on this now
I have installed a year before UBUNTU on my pc with dual boot (i.e. use either window 7 or ubuntu).the NTFS partition that contains the UBUNTU was corrupted and i wanted to take the dual boot from my PC. I used the instructions from the web site: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-...t-environment/but the disk management tool would not let me delete the NTFS partition.Could any one help me delete the NTFS partition and use just windows 7 as the only boot. step by step help would be great.
I got windows 7 running fine for a while now and ever since my XP did not boot anymore.I was not worried to much about it since i did not need it at the time.But now i really REALY need it,See i got all my Cubase projects in there and my cubase plug-ins al setup in XP and i need to get to the projects?At first it did not do anything and using easyBCD did not help either.I cpoied ntldr and detect to the root of C: wich contains my XP and now it shows the bootscreen but hangs on a black screen.The thing is right before the bootscreen shows i see the text" invalid boot.ini" flashing by very quick.I am able to enter that winXP install in safe mode and i tried safe/vga mode as well wich works but thats all.
I have a laptop I bought a year ago on which a created a dual boot Win 7 (32bit)/Win XP SP3 install, each on a separate partition. It was my first Win 7/XP dual boot install, and my first personal system that I allowed to have a Win 7 install on it at all, so although I have plenty of experience working on pretty much every previous version of Windows, I have very little experience with Win 7 and dual boot configs.
Today about 2 hours ago my audio spontaneously stopped worked for no good reason, so after shutting down each program to see if that cured it (which it didn't), I restarted the system. Out of the blue, for the first time I've ever experienced it, I received the msg "MBR Error 1" - Press any key to boot from floppy. I don't have a floppy of course on my laptop, and if I press any key I simply get the same msg. I turned the system off for a few minutes to make sure it was a good cold boot, but every time I still get the same msg. I tried switching the BIOS setting from IDE to AHCI (IDE is required for XP to boot, AHCI required for Win 7), but I still get the same error msg before I'm even prompted with the OS boot selection, so it made no difference of course.
I looked up this issue and found various suggestions, but none of the ones I found took into consideration a dual boot config., they were all Win 7 specific solutions. I don't what to try and repair the MBR only to have it screw up my dual boot config and be unable to access XP, which is what I use almost exclusively, nor do i want to lose access to Win 7 if at all possible.
I had a backup HD of my complete system that I saved several months ago when I upgraded my HD, and I periodically refresh the most important files on it, so I'm currently running on the laptop in question using my old HD, and it's working just fine. Worst case I can just clone my old HD to my newer HD that's screwed up, but I'll still lose a lot of changes I've made to the OS since I upgraded the HD and have to reinstall and config a number of programs, so that's my last option. I'll also have to back up about 200GB of data from the newer HD which is much larger than my old HD, and then restore it back after the clone, something that will take a lot of time and unncessary effort if I can just fix the MBR.
I'm having a problem every time I power on the system. I'm dual booting vista ultimate with win 7 build 7100; with vista I have no problem, but with 7 every time I start the system the first boot attempt gives me the error 0xc000000e after the boot manager display: "the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible".;after a reset the system boots 7 with no problems. Win 7 is installed in a brand new hd(seagate barracuda 1.5tb) and vista on a second hd.
I've search the web for people with a similar problem with no success. I've tryed already many solutions but the problem persists(latest bios for the motherboard, latest intel sata drivers, etc). I'm hoping that this could be a bug in win 7 instead of a hardware failure for the hd. Again, the strange thing is that this only happen after the power on. After that first error, no matter how many reboots, the system always boot without problems.
i did a terrible mistake. i installed windows 7 first on one drive and then i install windows xp on separate drive. and when i restart there was no boot menu to choose the OS from list only windows xp started straight away. i did not knew about EasyBCD . and i put my windows 7 DVD and run recovery. now i can goto windows 7 but xp is missing again. is there any way i will not install xp from beginning and windows 7 can add boot menu in startup to choose xp or 7.
I had Win XP and Vista set up as dual boot. I have back up images of both using Norton Ghost. I then upgraded the Vista partition with Windows 7 RC and all was fine for several months. Last week I had issues with the XP installation and the only resolution was to put the xp image back on the xp partition. This action has left me with a boot screen with XP and Vista on it and as expected only XP can be booted.
I put the Windows 7 installation disk back in and it recognised the boot screen error and fixed it; (too good to be true I thought!) When booting, I got the choice of XP or Windows 7, so the Vista option had been replaced ) however, there is an error that cannot be fixed and so the boot fails. The PC does the usual reporting to MS looking for a solution but can't find one.
So, will I have to replace the Windows 7 partition with the Vista image and then reinstall the Windows 7 or can I recover this another way? Also, what is the best way to image, individually, OSes, so that the boot screen doesn't get changed?
When my computer wouldn't turn on in the morning I did the usual diagnostics; unplug things one at time test with spare components etc... Any way I qucikly figured out the PSU was dead so I ordered a new one and was back up and running. However when I reassembled the computer after unplugging everything (and removing the m/b) I plugged the HDDs back into different SATA ports from which they orginally came. When I came to boot the computer up I got the error message: 'BOOTMGR missing' or it may have been 'NTLDR missing' I can't remember.
I fixed this problem by using the 7 startup repair utility. I have no problem booting into Windows 7, but I have lost the option to boot into my XP install on anther disk. I looked in the boot tab under System Configuration and the only OS showing is this Windows 7 install. So my question is this: how can I get the choice of which OS to boot back?
(I should mention that the XP install is on a different disk from the 7 install).
I've a Dual Boot with Xp/Win 7 on my office Desktop workstation. Window7 is the beta version of the Win 7. And like all other companies.... my company also want it's wallpaper and screen-saver on each machine ..... But i somehow manage to install Window 7 on my office Desktop.
Now i want to remove Window 7 partition and restore my Xp MBR and that too without using Windows Xp Bootable CD ( as CDs are not allowed in my company )...
How can i restore my Xp MBR while accessing my Xp Partition as i already have deleted my Windows 7 partition .
ok so im having a weird problem thats probably very easy to fix.
background info: before my Windows 7 install i had 3 partitions
vista 64
xp 32
empty (soon to be linux)
when i downloaded the newest win 7 build i deleted my xp 32 partition and installed Windows 7 on that partition. because Windows 7 creates that "reserve partition" or what ever, it extended my EMPTY partition with my vista partion. which cause it to become a "logical drive" rather than a "boot" drive. aka i cannot figure out how to access my vista OS.. rather annoying since im just toying with Windows 7 atm.
I had Win XP on 1 HDD & installed Win 7 on a different HDD. I think I accidentally did a dual boot install because Win 7 won't boot without the the XP disk connected to the motherboard.
That was fine until my XP drive died yesterday. Now Win 7 won't boot. The first time I tried to repair, Win 7 was not even seen. so I booted into diskpart and made the partition active. Now it could be seen as an OS.
Then I did a startup repair. It did whatever it does & when it was finished I restarted the pc but it didn't boot I went back to diskpart and confirmed the partition was active. I went back startup repair and tried again.
This time it said it could not detect a problem, but it still will not boot. What else can I do? My pc is homebuilt. Right now I have the 1 sata drive, 2.53 ghz cpu, 4gb ram, onboard video & sound
The difference between a Dual Boot and also a boot from VHD.
And 1 more question. Am now having a Windows 7 64 Ultimate base and i wish to load in a Win Vista to VHD. Is this possible by not using the Vista Mode provide by Microsoft and by not using any 3rd party software?
Is it possible to load Win Vista on VHD and make it bootable by having Win 7 64 Ultimate as base?
I currently have XP and 7 dual booted, but I want 7 to boot automatically when my computer starts up. On the other hand, I don't want to delete my Windows XP partition yet. XP is on the Active and default C: drive, and 7 is on my secondary partition E:
