Dual Boot Two Windows 7 Installations?
Sep 8, 2011
I'm looking for a security solution when it comes to stolen laptops. I would like a solution that involves both full system encryption for the main O/S, and a dummy O/S that is loaded with location tracking and spying software.The problem with doing this on one O/S is that full system encryption requires a password at boot, meaning the thief will be forced to wipe the HDD and the location tracking software will never get a chance to work. Likewise, I can disable the encryption and use a guest account on a single O/S, but that leaves my files vulnerable. I could also use a Truecrypt container for my secure files, but they are of fixed size, cumbersome to use, and can't protect all sensitive data without mucking up the main user account.
The best solution would be (ideally) as follows:One Windows 7 installation fully encrypted using Truecrypt. One Windows 7 installation setup as a dummy O/S. Grub Bootloader that can load either O/S (Grub supports unlocking Truecrypt). The two main problems that I have with this setup, is that this requires 5 partitions (2 for each Windows 7 install, 1 for grub), and I haven't figured out how to reduce this number. I can only have 4 primary partitions on a drive using MBR. Another problem I'm having, is that Windows 7 likes to mess around with the drive letter assignments, refuses to boot from anything but C: drive, and doesn't check UUIDs or anything else when selecting which partition to boot.I can try to do this with Windows XP as the dummy O/S, reducing the partition number to 4, and Windows XP will boot off any drive letter. Still, Windows has a problem with attacking other Windows installations, and causing general mayhem. Windows does not like to share the HDD with other Windows, go figure.
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Aug 14, 2011
evertyime i load windows the boot manager pops up showing 6 different windows installations. I have been troublshooting of late so have been installing/reinstalling windows. The thing is, i have formated each prior installation before installing a new one yet boot manager keeps popping up during OS loading showing me several different options. All of them except for the most recent have no data showing the formating worked. How do i prevent boot manager from showing all these old installations?
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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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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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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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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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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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Mar 10, 2012
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
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Jul 20, 2011
I have recently purchased an HP laptop with no cd-drive and hence created the recovery media on a USB.Due to some problems with this recovery media process - I ended up doing a clean install on Win7 instead.
Problem:I have a bootable USB stick, I need som assistance in putting both a Win7 image and a winXP image on this, and control it with a boot manager of some sort?
I recently had to assist my girlfriends father with repairing his xp installation on his netbook, also with no optical drive. So I thought for future events it might be good to have both
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Feb 19, 2011
one day it just shut down and would not startup any more, it goes straight to startup repair and fails and loops this. i have fixed this issue before, with bootrec tools on the 7 CD, but this time it wont do anything, no matter what i try it tells me "total identified windows installations: 0"does anyone know what to do, other than a fresh install, since i have hundreds of gbs of music and movies not recently backed up, and lots of work on the drive i cannot lose.
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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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Jan 26, 2012
I am running Windows 7 64bit. I have 15 updates that continue to fail. YES, I KNOW THE IMAGE SHOWS "1" - that's because I wanted to see if could actually perform one SMALL update. They're just a bunch of Security Updates for MS Office programs. DO NOT tell me to download these updates manually. THAT IS NOT A SOLUTION to a problem that will continue on forever. I clicked "Get help with this error" which brought me to the window's help as seen in the second half of the image. These errors have NOTHING to do with the problem I am having.
YES, I have disabled my antivirus program already and they still fail.
YES, I am logged in as the administrator and I have all the necessary privileges.
YES, I have used Windows' crappy troubleshooter.
YES, I used Window's crappy automatic "fixer" or whatever that junk is called.
About a week ago my computer was running EXTREMELY slowly and opening just about any program that was part of office was EXTREMELY laggy. I ran disk defrag, disk clean up, and I went through a bunch of services and start up programs that I didn't need and disabled them. This increased my computer's performance and MS Office no longer lags.
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Mar 13, 2011
I cannot install the Windows Service Pack 1 on my Windows 7 notebook. I have attached a picture of what it shows after failing to install the service pack after restarting the computer.
Upon clicking the "Go online..." link, I have followed the steps exactly as shown here: [URL] The service pack still fails to install.
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Jul 29, 2012
System hangs after installations like Windows 7 update,tune up utilities,new hardwares(data cards) etc which requires windows restart.windows hangs and blue screen appears after several minutes.Pls help. [code]
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Jan 26, 2012
I am running Windows 7 64bit. I have 15 updates that continue to fail. YES, I KNOW THE IMAGE SHOWS "1" - that's because I wanted to see if could actually perform one SMALL update. They're just a bunch of Security Updates for MS Office programs. DO NOT tell me to download these updates manually. THAT IS NOT A SOLUTION to a problem that will continue on forever.
I clicked "Get help with this error" which brought me to the window's help as seen in the second half of the image. These errors have NOTHING to do with the problem I am having. I have searched google and NO solution helps me.
YES, I have disabled my antivirus program already and they still fail.
YES, I am logged in as the administrator and I have all the necessary privileges.
YES, I have used Windows' crappy troubleshooter.
YES, I used Window's crappy automatic "fixer" or whatever that junk is called.
About a week ago my computer was running EXTREMELY slowly and opening just about any program that was part of office was EXTREMELY laggy. I ran disk defrag, disk clean up, and I went through a bunch of services and start up programs that I didn't need and disabled them. This increased my computer's performance and MS Office no longer lags.
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Feb 28, 2012
does the Ultimate version of Win7 include both installations x86 and x64?Second question, I usually format my computer pretty often, and I want to save some dough and just get the Upgrade version of Win7 Ultimate. I can use the upgrade over and over again right? Like, if I format my hard drive a bunch of times, as long as that copy of Win7 isn't being used by another machine, I can continue to install it and activate it right? Also, is there any difference between an actual retail copy, and the upgrade?
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Dec 8, 2010
I installed Windows 7 32bt profesional on the D: partition on an XP machine (C. Dual boot worked fine, but since I had to reinstall XP I have lost the option to change partitions at boot.I want XP to be the default but with Win 7 to an option at boot.My boot.ini is currently:[CODE]
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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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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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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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May 19, 2011
I wanted to dual boot Mac OS with my Windows 7 but everything I do it comes wrong, simply doesn't work. I tried dual boot with iatkos v1.0i, iatkos s3, iatkos v7 but still nothing.
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May 20, 2010
i have a hard disk 500gb and i made three partitions.the 1st partition i installed windows 7 first.what i did today?i wanted to install windows xp to the 2nd partition.i installed and now that is the biggest problem.i cant in to windows 7 anymore.when i turn on my pc it has only windows xp.it hasnt dual boot to choose what operation system i want to in.so what to do?i want windows 7 and xp with dual boot to choose
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Dec 31, 2012
I tried to make a dual boot with windows 7 and windows 8, but when I made a partition, the hard disk drive (C changed to dynamic.Can I still upgrade to windows 8?how can I convert it back to basic disk?I have windows 7.
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Dec 1, 2008
Video tutorial on how To Dual Boot Windows 7 ?
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Sep 23, 2009
I had Windows 7 installed on my PC. Today I installed Windows XP in another partition. But now when I restart my PC I don't get a DUAL BOOT mode screen. It automatically logs in XP. How do I log in WINDOWS 7 now?
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