Dual Boot From 2 Different HDDs?
Dec 28, 2012
I'm new around here so, if you've seen this before, please bear with me.I have a computer with 3 hard disks in it as follows.Patriot Pyro 120 GB on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (installed first).WD Velociraptor 450 GB on Windows 8 Pro x64 (installed second).Samsung something 2 TB storage (forget about this one).The 2 operating systems are completely independent and functioning properly; obviously, the SSD (Pyro) is set to boot first in the bios and, at start-up, there's no boot manager asking me which OS I intend to use. Basically, every time I want to logon on my Velociraptor with Windows 8 I have to press F8 at start-up and choose from the given list of bootable HDDs.Now, I've tried EasyBCD without luck and I've read somewhere that, apparently, the Windows 7 boot manager can't boot a Windows 8 partition so, my question is, is there a way to add my Windows 8 Velociraptor to the boot manager of the first booting HDD, i.e the SSD with Windows 7?
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Aug 27, 2009
I setup an XP/Windows 7 dual boot on two drives. Currently C: Windows 7, D:XP
Love Windows 7 and now I'm ready to convert to single boot Windows 7.
I'm not real savy re. bcdedit so will need very detailed instructions
I did find the command line in Windows 7 by going through accessories but I'm scared to go further without help.
Eventually I want to clean up the D:xp and use it for storage etc.
I'm guessing this procedure may have already be written up but I can't seem to find it.
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Nov 3, 2009
I've done some searching for this and found some similar issues but nothing fits exactly what I'm trying to do. I have been running Vista Ult. 64 bit for a little over a year and have loved it. It solved all the problems I had with XP Pro 32 bit on my hardware. I bought 7 Pro 64 bit through www.theultimatesteal.com since I'm taking some night classes. I forgot I couldn't upgrade from Ult.
to Pro so I had to do a clean install, which I did, on a separate drive. I have five drives in my system, C, D, and E are all 1TB while F and G are 1.5TB. C is where Vista is installed and G is where 7 is located. I'll be going back and forth between the OS's until I get everything the way I want it.
At that point I want to remove Vista and have 7 be the only OS. But I do not want to migrate the install onto the 1TB C: drive, I want to keep it on the 1.5TB drive but have it recognized as the C: drive. The install was done from within Vista from the download since my physical media has not yet arrived. So even when I boot into 7, it is seen as being installed on the G: drive; it did not make itself the C: drive.
So I'll need to get rid of Vista, get 7 to see itself as being the C: drive, get rid of the boot menu, and swap the drives and cables around to put my 7 install at the head of the HDD pack. I've already done a full system backup of my Vista install with Acronis TIH 2010. How do I need to go about this? On another note; why did MS only offer home and pro through ultimate steal? They offered Vista Ultimate. I mean, it is called ULTIMATE steal, not Pro steal afterall, and it would have made the upgrade process that much easier.
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Aug 4, 2012
I want to combine my 2 desktops into one, since I never use both together and the older one is very dated by now (think Time/tiny computers old). My current machine is an Asus P5Q-E with a C2D and has one HDD on a SATA connection running windows 7 64bit. The old computer is a single core Athlon 2700+ thing with a pair of hard drives on a single IDE ribbon.What I want to do is put the hard drives from the old machine into the newer and be able to choose between Windows XP already installed on the old master IDE hard drive and Windows 7 on the newer SATA drive (I've only kept the old computer to run XP for compatibility), all the while keeping the old slave IDE drive as a slave.
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Mar 12, 2012
I would like to remove Vista from my dual boot setup. Here is how I got to where I am now.
I had Vista installed on my PC hard drive (was C. Later, I decided to install Windows 7 HP on a new and seperate HDD. I unplugged the Vista HDD and added the new HDD and installed Windows 7 as if from scratch (I was worried that the install would mess up all my files on Vista). After the Windows 7 was up and running, I then reconnected Vista redesignated it as drive E: and after some searching on how to, I created the dual boot using my Windows 7 disk so I'm assuming the boot file in on drive C: along with Windows 7.
I now want delete the dual boot and Vista so I can use the drive as a backup drive or possibly Win8. I have found several methods to do this but none that really have my specific situation.
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Apr 10, 2011
Win 7 x64 Home Premium w/Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P, v.1.1 (P45), works great in IDE mode. (N.B.: eSATA port is just regular SATA port w/cable as provided by Gigabyte.) Trying to install external eSATA HDD. First I enabled AHCI drivers via registry. Then I turned on AHCI in BIOS. When I save BIOS and reboot, boot hangs when DVD writer performs sniffer boot, i.e., HDDs aren't found.
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Aug 21, 2009
i have an odd 5900 RPM HDD that i need to swap out. i'm going to swap it out mainly because it's better suited for storage/backup rather than being my main HDD for usage/boot-up.
i don't want to reinstall Windows 7 (7100) and i want to copy everything from HDD "a" to HDD "b". any ideas/suggestions/comments?
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Feb 14, 2012
I am upgrading my HTPC that i put together a few years back to have a SSD as a boot drive to increase space, quiet background running and speed up booting, etc.Everything was running fine before trying to exchange the raptor for the m4. I had a big issue getting Windows installed on m4 but finally did a clean install when no harddrive was connected except the SSD to the original SATA port of the boot drive. Once I had windows installed, and i was able to boot up with only the SSD attached to the boot SATA port, I attached the 3 storage drives to their original SATA ports and got an error when booting... it paused in mid boot, then started searching for a boot disk in the DVD drive. I looked at the BIOS and the SSD is listed as 1st (port0) on hard drive boot order and hard drive is 1st boot priority. I unplugged all 3 storage drives and it booted up without an issue
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Nov 17, 2012
I've just discovered (after a panicked hour trying to work out what was going wrong) that my boot and system partitions for windows 7 are on different hard drives. The boot partition is on my 120GB SSD and the system partition is on my 320GB WD HDD.
This means that I have to have both hard drives plugged in for my system to boot. Obviously this isn't the best set up as if one of the hard drives fails then I'm screwed! Is there any way to fix this without having to re-install windows?
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Sep 4, 2010
I have one HDD C: with Windows 7 64bit and another HDD from my previous dual boot PC with two partitions C: and E:, both winX pro.How is it possible to combine both HDDs, creating a multi boot system having as C: my Windows 7 drive?
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Jun 4, 2012
So I tried installing Windows on my new machine and did waht seemed to be the recommended thing and plugged in only my SSD into the Sata port, leaving my other drives unplugged until after the installation. Everything went fine and I was able to get Windows 7 up, drivers were installing and everything was peachy, but Then I plugged in my other drives, and when I did so with the computer running Windows immediately recognized them and I could access them, as well as do whatever I wanted. However when I restarted I got the message BOOTMGR is missing.
Now, you may be thinking that this is a simple issue of it trying to load from one of those other HDDs, just set the boot order in the BIOS blah blah. But its not. I set the boot order in the BIOS to use the SSD, I set the SSD to the top of the list within the HDDS priority order and still nothing. I then took it a step further and instead of selecting the order manually told it to boot from the SSD flat out, boot from this drive and the same error message came up. I already did the boot from Windows disc, startup repair thing - didn't work.
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Sep 23, 2012
I have just installed a new P5G41T-M LX Series motherboard and two DDR3 x 2GB replacing DDR2. During startup a message says BOOTMGR is missing, press Ctrl Alt Delete to restart, on restart the same message is repeated.
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Sep 12, 2011
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?
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Feb 4, 2011
dual booting windows 7 home premium x64 with linux fedora 14 on dual independantly dedicated drives. i am a college student with moderate computer (windows) knowledge but am doing software development and would like to play around with some linux for a class. i have no prior experience with linux and have minimal knowledge of operation. i am currently running windows 7 and would like to keep it as my primary os. i do not wish to share media files across drives or os's, windows does that just fine as is and i dont want to get into a third drive. my current drive is a 1tb wd black caviar hdd. it is also currently 2/3rds full and the desktop is about 6 months old so i would rather not partition the drive for a dual boot. i would think that there are some other advantages for the os's operating independantly off their own drives other than if one hdd dies i should still have the other with its os still ok. i have read some topics about RAID configs with dual boot setups with dual drives like this but am not very familiar with RAID. is there a RAID config that would be beneficial in this situation? i currently do not have a RAID card. my tower internals are not very accessible and i dont like the idea of disconnecting drives depending on which os i want to operate.
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Nov 12, 2009
As currently configured, XP is on drive C:, Win 7 was added to drive E:, and the system is currently run as a dual boot. Attempting to boot without the XP drive present will yield a "NTLDR is missing" error very early in the boot process.
I have already tried the following:
(1) I moved the hidden Windows Boot Manager files (bootmgr as well as the associated Boot folder) from the XP drive root to the Win 7 drive root.
(2) After physically removing the XP drive, I rebooted to the Win 7 installation DVD, and used the "Repair Your Computer" option to pull up the "Recovery Tools". Then, using the command prompt utility, ...
(3) I attempted to write a new boot sector to the Windows 7 disk using the command: Bootrec /fixboot, - that yields an error though. The Bootrec /fixmbr claimed success, but ultimately did not make Win 7 drive bootable.
I had to reconnect drive C: just to boot into Win 7 again to write this. I do have files backed up, but to format and reinstall files would take many hours beyond just the time to transfer 400 GB of data, since I have dozens of purchased applications that need to be freshly reinstalled and validated as well. Basically I want my E: drive now to be my boot drive while the C: drive is reformatted and used for general storage.
Any idea how to make my Win 7 drive bootable? Do I need a partition program that is more adept at creating a viable boot sector, or is that even the problem?
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Jan 2, 2010
I have Win XP 32 bit on my old drive. I buy Win 7 full retail and a new HD. I set bios to boot from cd etc. Win 7 starts up. It shows the 2 drives, so I select new drive...no problems. It starts install. I leave it to do its stuff.When I come back its up and all ok.I dint get any option to boot from XP. The drive was listed as "SYSTEM" but not old Windows or anything.
Also ASUS chipset drivers dont work and they were listed as 7 drivers.I tried Vista drivers but it normally shuts down and restarts. Nothing.
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Oct 14, 2009
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
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Oct 30, 2009
I have XP (x86) installed on one partition.
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?
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Aug 8, 2012
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.
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Apr 6, 2012
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..
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Sep 24, 2009
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.
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Dec 3, 2010
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
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Mar 11, 2009
How to Change the OS Name in Windows Boot Manager ?
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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.
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Aug 6, 2012
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.
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Feb 17, 2009
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.
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Nov 9, 2012
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.
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May 5, 2009
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.
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Aug 8, 2009
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.
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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.
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Sep 28, 2009
I have xp 32bit and 7 64bit on a dualboot and 7 is the default, however I want to change that.
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