Partitioning For Dual Boot From Scratch
Mar 7, 2009
I intend to rebuild my system shortly, mainly reformatting/partitioning my drives. Full system wipe, nothing less will do... Spring Cleaning.
My goal is to have a small Vista partition as a safety net, and optimize my configuration to use Windows 7 as my main OS. I have 2 640gb hdds, one with a 16mb cache, one with 32mb. Both sata and in no sort of raid.
After researching partitioning theory (people take it seriously!), I'd like to try and take advantage of the outer edge of my hard drives, giving my os and page file faster access times.
However, I am unsure of how much control I will have over partitioning my drives from scratch. I would like to assign the following partitions, beginning at the start of each drive (the outside edge):
hdd1(16mb): :/pagefile for windows 7 ~4gb; c:/Vista ~32gb; ...
hdd2(32mb): q:/Windows 7 32~64gb; ...
1. Will this give me any problems? particularly having the first hard drive contain the page file partition before the active system partition?
2. I've read elsewhere windows creates itself a 200gb partition on fresh install, is this forced?
3. Install Vista then Win 7, then which hard drive should I point my bios to for the boot loader?
3a. Assuming I install linux in the future, would I then need to point bios to the drive I put linux/grub on?
other details: running a nVidia 750i mobo with pretty good bios, perhaps providing more flexibility when it comes to boot? Intel core 2 and all that.
View 2 Replies
ADVERTISEMENT
Mar 19, 2011
is it possible to make a Windows 7 boot disc from scratch? By scratch I mean, I want all the programs I currently have installed on my PC and some items in my secondary drives to be there too, in other words, can I take my current Windows AND the programs/items I have on my drives, and put them together as one installation, so that when I format my computer and reinstall Windows, my basic programs, like Photoshop, After Effects, etc, are still there, so there is no worry about downloading it? That's my main point, I have to install Windows 7 and the programs I have in like 30 computers, it would take forever if I ALSO have to download programs like Photoshop, I don't have the best internet in town anyways.
View 5 Replies
View Related
Apr 21, 2011
This is quite a long story, So let me get straight to the point.On my Dell Optiplex 360 Computer (Windows 7-Ultimate) I partitioned the hard drive to make space for another windows installation. I then installed Windows Vista Ultimate on it.All of that went successfully but after a while it became useless for me and my computer.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Oct 20, 2009
I put a clean install of Win 7 onto my laptop and all was well. I went into disk management and shrunk my C: partition a bit to create a new partition.
Having done that, I now cannot boot up. It would seem that something I've done has caused the system reserved partition to become my C: drive and what was C: is now D:! Windows 7 attempts a repair when I boot up, but this fails due to a corrupt registry.
I've put the disk back in to see what that offers and it's here that I noticed that Windows is now on the D: drive. Opening a command prompt confirms how the drive letters have been reassigned.
I'm not 100% sure but assume that it's trying to boot from the system reserved partition and not liking it? I only just installed yesterday so don't mind doing a reinstall if that's the easiest fix, but just wonder if anyone knows what I can do to ensure this doesn't happen again? I presume my partitioning shenanigans are to blame somehow?
View 2 Replies
View Related
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?
View 5 Replies
View Related
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.
View 5 Replies
View Related
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?
View 9 Replies
View Related
Oct 16, 2010
Building the OS from scratch seem to me to be the best way to go when building a new computer. As time goes on after a year two or three the OS seem to get sick such as my auto run don't work no more and after Microsoft work on it for 3 hours it really don't run no more. Bugs, jitters, shakes and just old age. So after I build the computer I think I'm just going to build the OS from scratch. I've did it both ways, from scratch and just move it to the new computer and after I just reload the OS and rebuild it I feel so much better not to mention the computer runs like a high school student instead of someone like me that just took sum Vitamins.
View 9 Replies
View Related
Sep 22, 2011
I was working on Photoshop and had a "scratch disk" error... and checked my memory availability and was shocked to see that most of it was used. I don't have a whole lot on this laptop.I tried disk cleanup. That helped a little but barely made a dent. Lots of memory was sitting in some dump file. Everything is clean that can be clean but there is something hiding.
View 8 Replies
View Related
Apr 2, 2011
I have a project where i need to install windows on a PC from scratch, i have my laptop which has Windows 7 currently installed, Do I have to format my whole computer in order to install windows from scratch? or is there a way I can do this and not delete everything?
View 8 Replies
View Related
Jul 15, 2012
I have these annoying noises(scrathes) on my speakers,only during startup and shutdown.All windows sounds are disabled but i still get them (noises) everytime i boot or close the machine.Have this case over a year without any probs.It all began by changing motherboard and processor a couple of weeks ago.Same PSU,same cables to speakers ,monitor,power cords.
View 5 Replies
View Related
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.
View 9 Replies
View Related
Oct 20, 2010
Can I use a Windows 7 Pro Upgrade DVD key to re-build my PC from scratch? I have Vista Business and want to get Windows 7 Pro but don't want to upgrade on top of. I want to format and install Win 7 Pro from scratch.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Dec 17, 2009
I have a compaq presario 350 notebook running XP pro.... I have purchased the full installation disks for Windows 7. This came with 2 disks, Identicale in appearance. Can someone tell me what the 2 disks are for. I have managed to what I think is successfully install Windows 7. However The reason for me upgrading to Win 7 was to remove any old data and free up the Hard disk.
This has not happened. Now I have even less disk space than before. Did I do his wrong ? Can I delete the old partition. If so How do I do it and do I need additional software to do this. Will I need to retain set up files etc or can I completley wipe the Hard disk and install fresh. Sorry for sounding a bit vaigue. I'm just not good at this sort of thing.
View 5 Replies
View Related
Sep 27, 2011
System restore process is "stuck"
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium x64
PC: SONY VAIO EL series
I am using the proprietary restore software to (try) to reload the OS back to factory condition. I have tried several times to fix it, each time with no success. I have already written zeros to every sector of the HDD, so I'm trying to start from scratch. The restore disk/process takes place over three disks I had to create as soon as I got the laptop. The first disk went through fine, and now the second disk is in, with the percentage stuck up at 24%. It got there fairly quickly, but it's been stuck like this for at least an hour now. I'm tempted to wipe the disk again, but I'm hesitating because the HDD light is on and I can hear the DVD drive doing something, though I'm not sure what.
The loading bar/progress bar isn't budging, but the green background of it is changing color (like it does when something is going on.) It is sending me no error messages, and I'm just wondering if I should let it keep going or do it some other way. When I insert the first disk, there are two options to boot from, either the "VAIO care rescue," which is what I'm doing now (I selected the restore option in its menu) or you can choose "Windows 7 install" or something along those lines, I tried that but there didn't appear to be any option to actually install under there, since it didn't detect any "images" on any drives. Regardless, I need to get this thing up and running.
View 3 Replies
View Related
Nov 4, 2011
I have an old keyboard but I like it and I don't want to change it. This is it: Trust.com - Multimedia Keyboard KB-2100EI want to remap the keys under the scroll to do something else.They now have: Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V on them. I want to put another key combination to each one.I tried hotkeyp but that only replaces ctrl+v ( the current combination in place ) etc with the new combination and I can't use ctrl+v anymore. I need those hotkeys to be available all the time, so to start and stop hotkeyp is not an option.
View 2 Replies
View Related
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
View 9 Replies
View Related
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?
View 9 Replies
View Related
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.
View 1 Replies
View Related
Oct 12, 2012
I have a desktop with Windows 7 & a 1TB HDD, and everything is on the HDD. If I want to add an SSD & put the OS & some programs on it is there an easy way to do that? Perhaps copying all the data folders to an EHD & then making an image of the stripped down HDD & restoring that to an SSD? And then putting the data folders back onto the HDD?Or do I have to start from scratch & re-install a fresh copy of Windows 7 to the SSD?
View 5 Replies
View Related
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..
View 2 Replies
View Related
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.
View 3 Replies
View Related
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
View 9 Replies
View Related
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.
View 9 Replies
View Related
Mar 11, 2009
How to Change the OS Name in Windows Boot Manager ?
View 0 Replies
View Related
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.
View 2 Replies
View Related
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.
View 8 Replies
View Related
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.
View 9 Replies
View Related
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.
View 4 Replies
View Related
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.
View 4 Replies
View Related
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.
View 4 Replies
View Related
