Hiding A Windows 7 Dual Boot Completely?
Dec 16, 2010
I can do it with a dual boot of two different XP installs, but Windows 7 and XP is eluding me.
It's easier if I just tell you the end result of what I want things to look like; then maybe someone will know how to accomplish it. I have a laptop that currently has Windows XP (installed first) and Windows 7 (installed second) as a dual boot configuration.
What I want is to completely (temporarily) eliminate the boot menu. I don't want to just "limit it to 0 seconds" or anything like that -- I literally want to eliminate the boot menu. I want it so that when you boot the laptop, it boots Windows XP every time.
However, there should be "some method" to restore the boot menu - preferably by running a batch file in Windows XP. After you boot to XP, you can run this batch file, then reboot the computer, you'd get the boot menu and have the option of choosing Windows 7.
Once in Windows 7, you should be able to run a similar batch file to remove the boot menu again - so that when you restart the computer, it once again reverts to just booting to XP and doesn't display any menu, until you run the XP batch file again.
In XP I would have been able to do this with a batch file that rewrites boot.ini but since Windows 7 doesn't use boot.ini I don't know how to accomplish this from the Windows 7 side.
Also, let me clarify that I don't much care if the OS's can "see" each other -- I don't need to hide the drives -- I just don't want the boot menu to appear, basically making it "appear" that the system only has a single OS unless you are "in the know."
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Jan 16, 2009
I've just installed Windows 7 64-bit on my desktop PC as it worked so well for the past month on my laptop I shrunk my Vista 64 partition and installed Win 7 x64 build 7000 on the new partition. All went smooth and well!
As I wanted to transfer some files and settings from my Vista install to my new Windows 7 I assigned a drive letter to my hidden Vista drive in the "Disk Management" utility and went on with my business. Now, as I'm done I'd like to hide my Vista partition again but I can't get it to work
When I select my Vista partition and select the "Change Drive Letter and Paths" and then press the "Remove" button I get the following error box:
"Windows cannot remove the drive letter of your volume. This may happen if your volume is a system or boot volume, or has page files."
My Vista volume is the first volume of the physical drive, the boot files is there but I don't have any page file on it. How come this drive could be hidden and revealed in the first place but not hidden again?
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Nov 22, 2012
Well i had bough Gta IV for pc. And after some updates required by the game it needed to restart my pc, when it booted back up, it had said some files were corrupted and i couldnt boot the OS. I tried installing, but it kept saying boot Mgr was missing, and said to press ctrl alt and delete and restarted the system. After weeks of trying, i used an actual program on my laptop and burned an iso of windows 7 to a disc. I went thru the install and after using any somewhat demanding task or program like internet explorer it would freeze, mouse, keyboard, etc would freeze. I had to hard reset it. Now most of the time it gets to where it shows the green, blue and red colors or something spinning to form the windows logo and then freezes. Ive tried various methods of switching around hardware like video cards, switchin ram, etc. Still same results. Ran memtest and cant get results due to it freezing.
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Apr 8, 2012
When I boot my Win 7 machine and logon the desktop loads just fine, but when I click on the start button it freezes and doesn't come back - I can't click on anything. I think I've managed to narrow it down to being a problem with the DHCP service by disabling all services in msconfig and reenabling each one in turn. Everything was fine until I enabled the DHCP service - even starting manually after it has booted caused the issue to come back.
TSB SysInfo dump...
Tech Support Guy System Info Utility version 1.0.0.2
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, Service Pack 1, 32 bit
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU 540 @ 3.07GHz, x64 Family 6 Model 37 Stepping 2
Processor Count: 4
RAM: 3063 Mb
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series, 1024 Mb
Hard Drives: C: Total - 231466 MB, Free - 189867 MB;
Motherboard: Packard Bell, imedia S3810 Antivirus: None
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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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Jan 29, 2011
One month old asus laptop just stopped working. Now won't boot up. Goes as far as choice between "launch startup repair" and "start windows normally".. Tried both options but ends with blank screen. Tried online suggestion for asus of using F9 when logo comes up.
does this mean the laptop is unrepairable.
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Aug 29, 2009
I have multiple hard drives (not partitions) on my system. My new RAID-0 SSD has the Windows 7 install on it while my old WD Raptor has my vista boot on it. I have been trying to find a way to remove the old Vista drive as I want to reformat it and turn it into a developers drive (for my various PHP projects).
Is there any way to remove this drive so it doesn't effect the Windows 7 drive? I tried removing the drive and rebooting but it fails to boot. I can't reformat it regularly as Windows tells me it is a System Partition. I believe that since my system relies on the Vista disk to boot that this causes an issue right? Well how do I fix this issue if you don't mind me asking?
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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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Aug 4, 2012
My PC has just presented me with a completely black screen on Boot Up which has no error messages or text showing. The fans power up as do , I think , the DVD drive and there is a power light showing on the external drive . The usb printer also has power.Obviously there could be several causes for this , including failure of the monitor, video cards , ...etc.However , before I start digging into the case and , as I am having OS problems , I am assuming that this result of a completely black screen cannot be explained by an OS failure to boot !Is that a reasonable assumption ? If the problem was the failing to boot , I assume I would still get some DOSS-TYPE script appearing on the monitor .
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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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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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May 27, 2011
I have 34 optional updates offered on my computer. All of them are for languages I don't speak. How can I hide them permanently to stop the constant display of "Optional Updates"?
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Nov 9, 2012
I have a neighbor who has dell laptop with windows 7 and IE 9. Her kids are always trying to get onto the internet. Is there a way to hide the internet icon from the desktop and start taskbar?
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Apr 21, 2012
Does hiding updates mean never get them windows .net for servers right?
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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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Oct 23, 2010
I am using an object dock in Windows 7 home basic and I want to hide/remove the icons of mycomputer and recycle bin on my desktop because it is already in the dock..Unfortunately I don't know how to hide those icons.
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Nov 21, 2012
Stop Windows 7 assigning my folders to its own special ones
This is a year-old Windows 7 Pro PC that gets very heavy home office use. Just yesterday I noticed that 2 top-level folders I created long ago no longer appear in the Explorer view of folders under C:.
In each case, if I explicitly enter the folder's path in the address bar (or the Run dialog), the folder content displays, but the address bar reads, for example, Computer - OS (C) - My Pictures. (The title bar shows the path, but the address bar is beating its own drum.) Another folder has now suddenly been declared My Music. And while these folders do contain lots of pictures and music, respectively, they have other stuff in them too, and I don't want Windows to apply its heavy-handed classifications. Strangest thing is, I'm certain the My Pictures and My Music folders were located elsewhere until yesterday.
If I go up one level from either folder (to C), the folder's name & icon are not shown in the list of other top-level folders. That is, I can't cursor down to it and hit Enter to open, as I can with dozens of others.
I've never used, nor liked being cajoled into using, Microsoft's array of "My XXXX" folders, nor am I partial to the recently birthed "libraries" concept. I have my own carefully designed folder hierarchy, and must work in it at great speed, so short paths and quick keyboard access are critical. I deliberately name certain folders toward the top of the alphabet, so scrolling down to the 'My's -- even if I were to accept these involuntary relocations
This only just started, and I can't figure out what provoked it. Is there a setting that governs this that can be disabled? If it's a new "feature" added in an update, I see it as inexcusably intrusive.
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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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