Dell PC Inspiron 600 - Win 8 / 7 Dual Boot Gone Wrong
May 19, 2014
I was wanting to dual boot a Dell pc inspiron 600 with win 8. I thought I will breeze through it like I used to circa WXP/Vista/W7 and didn't research what changes there might be with Windows 8. I have focused my attention more on Android and I really should have done that research.
I hadn't backed up externally docs that I needed to save - so I will remove the drive and copy the contents to my laptop to be on the safer side. So the first wrong move has led to missteps.
I downloaded Easus and created a blank disk space before the current active partition instead of behind it. I thought I needed to have win 7 in the first partition. Before rebooting I also installed a popular freeware boot selection manager (I totally forget the name but I know some most will know the one I am referring to EDIT: ***EasyBCD*** ). It gave me a warning that no bootable system was selected. I kept editing to point it to current Windows 8 but nothing changed. It also warned me that my pc might not boot. I thought I will fix it to a bootable drive with my old discs-Ultimate boot cd, CPM, etc. Easus performed creation of the new partition and then trouble started. It refused to boot.
None of my discs are working as they did before Windows 8. on UBCD Fdisk cannot find any partition it can make active. I decided not to write an new MBR. My windows 7 install CD is giving me the "Windows cannot be installed to Disk 0 Partition X" details ->"The selected disk is of the GPT partition style."
Here are the partitions
My questions are: At this point I don't mind to have only windows 7 installed or if this situation is salvageable a dual boot then I don't have to remove the drive to copy the docs. I can just boot into 7 (which is what I mainly want to use) and just have access to Windows 8 partition from there to access my docs. I would prefer not to pull the drive out if I can avoid it but only if I know for sure what I am doing.
Second question : I believe partition 3: 489GB is the newly created one and Part 4 OS would be the Wind 8 partition. How can I know for sure that this is the wind 8 partition?
If I format the partition 3: 489GB will windows now allow for windows 7 to be installed?
Is there any way I can fix windows 8 partition to boot?
Lastly the basic question is how do I fix this error so that I Can install windows 7?
I don't have any pre-created OS discs of Windows 8. My current laptop is a toshiba win 7.
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Nov 19, 2013
I just received my Inspiron 15z with 32GB mSATA and 500GB HDD, and I was disappointed to find that Windows 8 is installed on the 500GB (presumably 5400 RPM) HDD. For performance sake, I expected that the OS would be installed on the mSATA drive.
I'm not sure the best way to fix this with the Recovery Media, as I've never done this before. I don't want to run into Windows activation issues, but I want to do a clean installation using the mSATA drive as my OS drive.
I don't really care about the recovery partition, since it's apparently configured incorrectly (in my opinion). I just want the OS on the mSATA drive.
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Jun 25, 2013
Diagnostics says all is fine no problems found. I can boot to bios... cant boot to safe mode.
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Mar 31, 2013
I own dell inspiron 14z and i tried to install windows 8 on the 32SSD drive, i turned SATA controller to AHCI and installed the OS. Windows was booted ones and it was all fine but when i restarted the computer it consistently led to the screen "your pc ran into problem and needs to restart...." I tried turning back to ISRT and same, I reinstalled windows and turn the acceleration of but after installing the driver an error was occurred says "your computer does t meat the minimum requirements....".
I turned back to ISRT and tried to install the windows again but it could not find the hard drive even after browsing through usb (it was loading and loading but didn't find anything) and now i really don't know what to do...
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Jul 25, 2013
Ihave Inspiron 15R 5520.
Iam installed fedora linux and. Lost the boot. For windows. Now i have recovery in partition and my system But. Not work !!
Now what I can do. How can i Dowland Image recovery?
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Mar 30, 2014
I have used two XP PCs to separate US and Canadian versions of Intuit Quicken and Turbotax (I am a dual citizen). I did this because I learned the hard way that funny things could happen, as it seems there can be some conflicts when each are on the same system. Now that Microsoft has encouraged me to buy a hot new XPS 8700, I am considering how I might accomplish this on one system.
Establishing a separate partition with another instance of 8.1 seems logical, unless someone has another idea.
If this is best/only way to achieve this separation, does my MS license allow this, and how do I access it^
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Aug 29, 2014
I have a brand new inspiron 5447, which was working fine till yesterday. If I try to boot now, it is just stuck at Dell logo and I am unable to go into BIOS settings. I tried pressing F2 and F12, but the screen is still stuck at same Dell logo screen.
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Jun 9, 2013
One day old Insiron R 5521 of mine has a problem. I get the error -"Recovery , Your PC needs to be repaired. The application or OS couldn't load because a required file is missing or contains errors. Error Code: - 0xc0000225 File:Windowssystem32winload.efi "
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Apr 14, 2014
So, I got a Inspiron 3537 i5. Nice laptop for it's price. Downloaded all the manuals, made my recovery DVDs. All was well in my world.
First thing I noticed is that there is no info in the manuals for tweaking the BIOS and since it is my first experience with a UEFI bios I was a bit disappointed. Is there a manual available for it?
Next I upgraded ATI Drivers to 13.12. I am an old user who always knew that updates were usually a good thing to do. Got in the same problem as many others with PC screen not waking up from sleep.
Thought I would do a recovery from the disk, but after trying various combinations (Ctl+F11, F8, F12 etc) I couldn't find a way to boot in the Recovery console. I did the recovery from my DVD and the laptop works fine.
How to add in UEFI bios a boot option to the Recovery partition? I undersstand that I have to create a new boot option using "Add boot option" and the two options available are to boot to the 1st (windows EFI) or 2nd (recovery partition), but the path for the recovery efi file to be loaded is unknown (+ you can't have access to the recovery partition to see the contents of it from windows).
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May 2, 2013
I bought dell inspiron 7520 and tried creating the additional partition on the hard drive. After rebooting the laptop started showing blue screen and saying that the file Windowssystem32winload.efi doesn't exist or is corrupt. Error code: 0xc0000225
Since the laptop was sold just with the installed windows but without the CD with windows8, I'm not able to reinstall it.
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Dec 26, 2013
On my friend's Dell Inspiron laptop, Windows 8 will not boot. I want to boot to the repair disk to restore an image I had created. F12 on boot does not show the DVD drive as an option. I went into Setup/Boot and disabled Secure Boot, still did not show the DVD as a boot option. I went back to Setup and selected Boot List Option>Legacy. Now it shows the DVD drive as an option to boot. I booted the repair dis, went through all the dialogs to select the image I had created, but when it goes to restore it it says it cannot because the image was made in UEFI, and it is now set for BIOS.
I went back into Setup/Boot and I see that the option Load Legacy Option ROM is now Enabled, it did it on its own. As a test I set it back to the defaults and re did it as above, and again it automatically changes Load Legacy Option ROM, which I assume is what is creating the problem.
So my question is what do I need to do to boot from the Windows Repair Disk?
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Oct 20, 2013
I have a Dell Inspiron 7720 Win 8 x64 PC which includes UEFI (described in Microsoft link below). However, UEFI is accessed on Win 8 from Settings Charm > "Change PC Settings". This requires that you have booted the system already. In case of a main disk crash, you need to boot from another drive, like a thumb drive.
During restart my Dell PC displays "F12 Boot Options" in lower right of screen during restart, but multiple presses of F12 during startup are ignored. Likewise when I try F1 or F2 during startup. So I have no way to specify an alternate boot drive.
I am thinking maybe my PC is defective, but also maybe I'm missing something. What is UEFI? - Microsoft Windows Support
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Feb 15, 2013
I finally got Windows 8 installed on my Dell M4600 dual boot with the Win 7 install. This is my business laptop so I needed to maintain full functions to Win 7 (I will completely migrate to 8 in the future) and ensure I could continue to work with it. I have two SSDs: Drive 0 is a 2.5" 256 GB used for data as d:. Drive 1 (this is how the bios designates them) was originally a 128GB MSATA SSD. I cloned this to a newer 240GB SSD to provide more room for the two OSs (and provide a good fail safe). With the clone I cleared the Dell recovery partitions and added the partition for Win 8. Currently I have some wasted space at the front but I will sort that out in the future. It has taken a week to get Win 8 up and running properly (tracking down drivers, getting the fingerprint scanner to work etc) but it seems to be stable and I have started to use it. Now to the problems:
1. The boot screen is the old Win 7 type (not really a problem by itself). I have used EasyBCD to adjust the default to Win 8. If I do a "restart" from 8 and then select 7 no problem. On the other hand, any restart to 8 brings up the MS flag and twirling thing and stops. I need to power down and start back up. No problem if I shutdown and then restart. I've been working on figuring out how the whole process works and I suspect the problem has to do with the switching drive letters depending on which OS is started and/or the Resume parameters in the BCD. Additionally, during all the hassle with installing Win 8 the boot loader is on the Win 7 partition. I'm hesitant to start using BCDedit on this laptop as I would prefer not to mess anything up. I also will not go through the hassle of re-installing Win 8 again - 3 or 4 times was enough.
2. At some point I will delete the Win 7 partition and expand the space for the Win 8 (I'll need to use some third party tools to do this). My concern is that the boot loader is on the Win 7 partition so how to move it to the Win 8 partition if possible.
I've attached two screen shots for the disk management status (win 7 an 8) and attachedoutput form BCDedit /enum all for both OSs.
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Sep 29, 2013
I have a Dell 755 dual core, I loaded win 7 had a problem was with my CD rom, on boot up it was there, in devices it was there name and model, but as soon as I put CD in and opened the CD it would disappear off the machine sometime it would read what was on the disc and then disappear, I asked many question nobody gave me an answer. I installed it on a Dell 270 it works great.
Now on Win 8, the problem I have is if I have my mobile modem in the usb when I boot up my CD rom doesn't appear, if I take the modem out and boot up my CD rom is there with the drive letter G, when I put the modem in the CD remains and works correctly.
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Apr 3, 2014
My (12-year-old) son's computer won't boot. It's a Dell Inspiron 17" running Windows 8, bought from Costco in July 2013. When I turn it on, Dell logo comes on and then in upper left it says "Checking Media [fail]", then "checking media" again, then "No Boot Device Found. Press any key to reboot the machine". I insert a USB recovery drive (it was made for my Toshiba that runs Windows 8.1, but it should work anyway, right?).
I choose US keyboard layout and it then opens into Recovery Environment. I choose Troubleshoot → Refresh Your PC. Message appears "The drive where Windows is installed is locked. Unlock the drive and try again." I go to Troubleshoot → Startup Repair, which runs and then says "Startup Repair couldn't repair your PC." I then go back to Troubleshoot → Command Prompt and run chkdsk on Windows drive (c). It says "Windows has checked the file system and found no problems." Dell would probably tell me it's a hard drive failure and tell me to buy another one.
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Jan 9, 2013
So I have both Windows 7 and 8 on my machine and am currently primarily using 8. I save all of my work and files to my 8 partition C: whenever I choose the location, but for applications/programs that automatically save to a library and where I can't choose the location, those programs always save it to my Windows 7 partition E:.
For example, using Windows key + PrtSc takes a screenshot of your screen and saves it to your pictures library. However, the picture gets saved to E:Users[username]Pictures instead of C:Users[username]Pictures. I guess it thinks my main library is still on the 7 partition instead of the 8 partition. The same things happens with games that I play where the save files are automatically saved in the My Games folder in My Documents. The save files are saved in the E: partition documents library instead of C: partition documents library.
Basically, I don't know where I'd go or what setting I'd change to fix this behavior. My default OS is set to Windows 8 in msconfig and all of my games are installed on my C drive, so I don't know why they would save to my E drive. Since the screenshot command uses the same behavior, I'm guessing there's a setting somewhere that's making my Windows 7 library the default.
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Jan 9, 2014
Strange problem I am having with my windows 8.
I have an ASUS laptop running 8.0 which I am running with a second screen (dell monitor) connected via VGA. I have it set so the external monitor is the primary screen and the laptop is the secondary screen. It is set for a taskbar on each display, with the primary taskbar containing the shortcuts on the monitor, so when I click them they open there. It's been working fine for months.
So I switched it on today and my taskbar shortcuts have jumped to the taskbar on the second (laptop) screen, however my external display is still set as the primary and still has my desktop icons, trashcan etc but a blank taskbar (like the one that used to be on the secondary display)! When I click the shortcuts which are now on the taskbar of the laptop screen they open on the monitor. (ie the wrong screen) I disconnected the monitor, turned off the extended desktop and set it to just use the laptop screen. All my desktop icons moved to the laptop screen but the taskbar shortcuts vanished and I was left with a blank taskbar. If I plug the monitor in again and extend the desktop they reappear, but on the wrong screen. Even if I reboot without the external screen connected I get no shortcuts until I plug in the monitor and set it to extend the desktop. I have checked all the taskbar settings and they are all correct.
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Aug 12, 2014
I have acer aspire v3-571g laptop with windows 8.1 x64 based OS. Processor is Intel Core i5.
To get a faster booting, i selected 2 processor instead of 1 in advanced boot option (msconfig) by mistake and now my laptop become dead slow on booting and startup.
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Dec 15, 2013
I just got a refurbished ASUS K75DE laptop, and it came with Windows 8 on it. I am wanting to run a dual boot with Win7, so I disabled fast-boot just fine, and went into the UEFI BIOS and disabled the secure boot.
While I was there, I did like I have always done and set a BIOS boot-up password. I then proceed to boot to my Win7 installer USB Flash drive, but I was running low on battery power so I aborted the install and shut the computer down to try again later.
Now however when I get into BIOS to select boot priority, all options are grayed out except for system time and a few other non-essentials. At the bottom of the first BIOS screen it says "User Level : User" and I can't seem to find a way to reverse this issue. So now I'm stuck, can't boot to anything but the HDD because it is first by default.
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Jun 28, 2013
I have installed Blue 8.1 on a separate drive in my system along side 8.0. When I restart the 8.0 boots unless I manually select the 8.1 drive in bios. How can I alter the Boot menu to add the option to boot from either OS?
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Feb 18, 2013
Late last Fall I bought a new Desktop, an HP H81414, with Windows 8 installed with the intention of installing Windows 7 on an SSD. I migrated Window 8 to an SSD, removed that from the system, installed new SSD and put Windows 7 on it. Both worked fine. I wound up with 2 SSD's. capable of running on the EFI BIOS machine with Secure Boot turned off. I later bought a new laptop with Windows 8. I found the Win 8 with Classic Shell to be very acceptable.
What I would like to do now ,if possible, is to mount both SSD's in the HP case and switch to either one of them at boot.
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Apr 28, 2014
I had windows 7 running on my computer. When windows 8 came out I used a second harddrive as the windows 8 installation drive. Windows 8 automatically setup a dual boot system where every time I started the computer it took me a windows screen where I could select either windows 7 or windows 8. This has been going on since Windows 8 was released.
I decided it was getting old so I decided it was time to remove the old windows 7 harddrive. I tried doing it inside the windows 8 dual boot screen but could not find an option. So I decided to reformat the windows 7 harddrive. I did this in command prompt mode. After doing so when my computer restarted it said it could not find any harddrive to boot. Windows 8 is installed on the other harddrive, the one that was not reformatted. So how do I get it to start using that harddrive as the boot drive? I checked my bios and even physically disconnected the old HD that had windows 7 on it, but none of that seemed to work even though the Windows 8 HD is definitely in the boot order in the bios.
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Jul 11, 2014
I recently felt the urge to experiment with Linux and installed Ubuntu Mint and tried to set up dual booting.
However I seem to have only suceeded in preventing Windows booting at all. I cannot get into the recovery drive to undo my wrong doing.
How can I reset the windows boot manager without access to windows or recovery partitions?
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Jun 8, 2013
I am dual booting Windows 8 and win7. I actually have Windows 8 installed on its own hard drive and win 7 installed in its own hard drive. The win7 hard drive has been in use for the past 2 years and I have had Windows 8 running for about a week now. I purchased another hard drive for Windows 8 and left the old Win7 as it was.
I also have 3 other hard drives in the system. Everything is formatted NTFS.
So my system is as follows
Drive C - Boot Drive - I physically swap out the dedicated hard drive for Win 8 or Win 7
Drive D - internal 250 GB sata drive
Drive F - internal 250 GB sata drive
Drive H - internal 250 GB hard drive.
I have been running this config for about 2 years under Win7 with no problems.
The problem that I have now is when I swap the boot drive and boot up a different OS than last time (Like booting Windows 8, powering down system, swap boot drive, boot Win7) the system always says that there are problems on the 3 non-boot drives. It runs chkdsk(it least that is what it look like) and processes the 3 non boot disks one at a time which take about 10-12 minutes for all 3. Most of the time it finds no problems, but about 1 out of 5 boots will find a problem with one of the disks and then fixes it. The disks seem to be OK while I am running. I then power down and swap boot drive and reboot the other os and we start all over again. I am powering the system completely down for each reboot to make sure that the disk cache is flushed.So far the disk problems have been fixed by chkdsk at boot, but I am sure the day will come when the disk cannot be fixed and I will loose data.
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Jul 30, 2013
I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron 17R SE.
The first thing I wanted to do to it was transfer the OS to an SSD, and use the 1TB drive that came with the computer as a data drive.
I wanted to shrink the C: OS partition so it would fit on my SSD but the Windows Shrink Partition tool wouldn't let me due to unmovable files.
I tried using the Windows 7 File Recovery backup tool to do a backup. With over 500 GB space on my backup drive and only 65 GB used on the 1Tb drive I was backing up, it kept telling me not enough disk space. Eventually I gave up.
I opted to install EaseUS TODO Backup and tried to backup the the whole 1TB drive. It raised an error indicating too many unnamed partitions. I opted to backup only the C: OS and the EFI System partition - leaving 3 oem hidden partitions not backed up as I wasn't going to do anything to them anyway. It worked.
I used EaseUS Partition Master to shrink the C: OS partition to 120 GB. Worked again.
I thought now would be the time to generate the Windows backup - created an image OK. Afterward however, it failed to generate the system recovery disk indicating some invalid parameter error. This was concerning. I went to the Dell Backup and Recovery tool and it told me it couldn't find the recovery partition. Not good again.
In disk management, all partitions are still there. I'm pretty sure the 3 OEM hidden partitions (40Mb, 500Mb, and 14.73Gb) had names in brackets like 'Healthy (Recovery Partition)', ... They all just say 'Healthy (OEM Partition)'. I'm guessing EaseUS Partition Master messed up their names and/or messed with their content.
At this point, the computer still works fine, and on the second pass I was able to backup the entire drive using EaseUS TODO Backup. I can't use the Dell or Windows backup utilities. I'm not sure what mess I created by messing up the 3 oem partitions, or if I can recover somehow.
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Dec 11, 2013
I cloned my existing Windows installation (8.1 pro, 32 bit) onto my new SSD. I got everything up and running, and I still have my old Windows installation on one of the partitions of my HDD.
Can I turn this setup into a dual boot?
I think this could be useful, in case the new installation gets borked, or in order to run an effective malware scan on the SSD, etc.
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Jul 17, 2014
My dell Inspiron 15 7537 crashed by itself yesterday.
It wants to restart and repair itself but every time it does it fails and tries again.
What should/can I do to repair it?
Or should I just try to install windows 8 again? And how do I do that?
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Nov 8, 2013
I have just upgraded to Win 8.1 (Pro) OS.
I have downloaded and installed new drivers for Win 8 (Pro) last year.
Are the drivers for Win 8 suitable for Win 8.1 PC?
May I know if Dell going to come up with new drivers for Win 8.1?
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Jun 13, 2013
I have a new laptop with Windows 8 and I really like it. I also have an older Dell Inspiron 1521 with an AMD 64 bit processor, 4 gig of RAM and a 160 gig SSD. It runs Win7 just fine and I believe it will run Windows 8. My new laptop came with 8 installed so I don't have a box to check the low end specs for running 8. I have Linux on it now and I would like to run both. It boots in to Linux in 20 seconds, about the same time as my new Windows 8 laptop.
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Nov 20, 2013
Hey I just got a brand new Dell Inspiron with Windows 8 (got it yesterday). In the power options I have the settings set to sleep when closing the lid of the laptop, but the computer seems to always turn off. When I open the lid, my computer is completely off and I have to press the power button to turn it back on and wait for windows to reload.
This is not a battery problem as it happens even when plugged in. I have also tried using the command prompt "powercfg /hibernate on" but it hasn't fixed anything.
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Oct 8, 2013
I have a Dell Inspiron One 2330, which had Windows 8 Pre Installed, one fine day it stopped booting windows 8...
No matter, I had the recovery media... I made a full system restore... and nothing... it still does not boot.
Black screen after windows logo.
Dell Diagnostics accused no trouble whatsoever, all the tests performed successfully.
After a lot of tinkering, I managed to go back to Windows 7, the system runs fine, but I am running a trial license of Win 7, as I have not yet bought a license (I actually tried restoring the system using the Dell generated backup disks AND the Windows 8 OEM Disk, provided after those did not work).
What could be preventing Windows 8 from booting, since neither the installation fails, nor the HDD acuses any problem?
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