I downloaded and directly installed windows 8 on my laptop's E drive, while I already had windows 7 on C drive, on the same HDD.
Now it directly boots to windows 8. How to dual boot windows 7 & windows 8, or any other way to use windows 7 in my laptop without losing my C drive's data.
I want to upgrade windows 7 Pro system to windows 8.1 pro without loosing data or installed software settings.
is there a easy/legal way to this???
I have windows 8 installed in my laptop and i want to downgrade it ... i have some partitions as shows in pic. i want to keep safe data from some partitions and other partitions i want to delete. partitions.jpg
i have Windows 7 ghost image and Windows 7 installation disc also.
Deleting those partitions ( recovery,EFI , OEM ) is safe?
I have installed windows xp pro on a separate partition on my hard drive , i am already running windows 8.1 on my c drive the problem is when i boot up i only get the option to boot into windows 8.1, windows xp does not appear in the boot menu, i installed windows xp on my spare partition to run some older programmes but when my pc boots up it boots straight into windows 8.1 there is no option to boot into windows xp.
View 13 Replies View RelatedWindows 8, 64-bit.
Used to run Win 7 on our main drive, and used a second one for storage (mainly games), however something happened, making us unable to boot. So we decided to upgrade to Windows 8, which we put on our secondary drive, and that's now the main one (boots from here, is Disk 0). When I turn on the PC, it asks me whether to run on Windows 7 or 8 (8 is the default). C: contains Windows 8, D: Contains Win 7.
MAIN PROBLEM: Since we're going to use the old main drive as storage (the one with Windows 7), I wanted to format it, but it won't let me because, I suppose, of the System files still on it (System, Active). Picture of Disk Management below. How do I format it?
Installed Windows 8 first, then installed Win XP to a second partition on the same disk.
In windows 8, the XP partition is seen as D:
If I boot to XP, XP sees itself as I:
it sees the windows 8 partition as C: and that is what I want, is C: being win 8 and XP being D:
Is there anyway to change the lettering on the XP partition?
I am planning on building a new computer, and I want to put a 250GB SSD (Samsung 840 EVO) in it to use with 8.1 Pro. However, most of the programs and data I need are still on the old computer's boot drive, specifically all of my STEAM games (none of which I have the DVDs for.)
My question is if I can create symlinks to the old boot drive without losing data on it. This will most likely be a temporary measure, as the drive's a fairly slow 5900RPM Barracuda, and I want something faster, but I can't afford a better one just yet...
I have an SSD drive with 2 partitions on it. 1st partition has Win 7 on it as drive letter C. 2nd Partition has Win 8 on it as Drive letter W. At 1 point in time if I booted to Win 8 the drive letter would dynamically change from drive letter W to Drive letter C and make Win 7 drive letter W. The revers was true if I booted to Win 7. Something has changed somewhere, where this dynamic drive letter changing is no longer working. When I boot to Win 8 the drive letter remains to be drive letter W & Win 7 is still drive C. This is causing problems when I'm booted to Win 8 with regard to installing & using apps while in Win 8 since the C drive is really the Win 7 system drive.
How can I fix this to get back the dynamic flip flopping of drive C? I confess to being somewhat ignorant when dealing with this particular area of things.
I am trying to get my external hard drives setup from a freshly rebooted installed computer. I recently placed an external hard drive with all my back up files on my computer, but this drive is not going to be my main drive. I have two others I will be using as a main hdd and a backup drive that are brand new.
So, the question is, if I were to use a utility like the Windows 8.1 disk management feature to either delete the drive letter or even change it to another one, will that mess up the external hard drive or even lose data? Because until I transfer my files to my backup disk I am afraid of losing my only copy of my files.
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.
When I go to Computer Management my main (OS) drive shows as "Disk 1" and my 2nd internal data drive shows as "Disk 0". Should I switch the SATA cables so that the main drive will show as "Disk 0 and the 2nd internal drive as "Disk 1"?
View 5 Replies View RelatedI 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?
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?
View 3 Replies View RelatedLate 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.
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.
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.
I have a laptop that crashed over the weekend. I need to do a restore on the computer but before I do I need to get the documents and pictures off of the drive. I've taken the drive out of the laptop and plugged it into my Windows 7 desktop using an external USB bay. I hear the computer detect the drive but it will never show up as a drive. If I look in Computer Management it shows up in there.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI 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.
Asus Zenbook UX51VZ / Windows 8 OEMUpgraded to Win 8.1 around three weeks agoFaced no problems (surfing, media programs, games worked fine)Last Friday during startup I received an error message telling me that something isn't correct and that windows will try to find the problemGot “directed” to the following menu Refreshing doesn't work as my hard drive seems to be blockedCan't select any restorable system images (as there aren’t any)I really don't want to format my hard drive! Tried to safe my data by looking everything up, managed to gain access to my second partition on which I had only media files. Still, I urgently need to get the files on my C: drive back.
How I recovered my data on D: :
Ubuntu Live CDBoot Ubuntu instead of windows (which can’t be booted anyways)Nautilus, selected D:/ (called DATA)Received following error message: "Error mounting /dev/dm-6 at /media/ubuntu/DATA: Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=999,gid=999,dmas k=0077,fmask=0177" "/dev/dm-6"
[Code]....
I've recently encrypted my main drive, and all is well. However, I would like to be able to encrypt one of my data drives as well and bitlocker isn't even detecting the drive's existence under "Fixed Drives"
I'm on windows 8.1 machine, the encrypted main drive is a SSD drive, and the data drive is a regular WD spinning drive SATA drive. I would like to have the WD data drive encrypted as well...
As the title states, I'm switching back from Mac to PC. I have all of my precious photos (I love photography in particular) and music stored on an external hard drive (iomega), but it's been formatted for Mac OS. I read that you can't transfer from a Mac OS formatted drive to a PC.
Telling me to reformat the ext. hdd to fat32 isn't going to work, because first of all, that would delete the valuable data, and fat32 only allows the transfer of files less than 4GB.
How I can transfer all of my data on my Mac OS X-formatted external drive to my new Windows PC. It is absolutely essential.
I have windows 8 to go on my 320 GB USB harddrive and I would like to be able to boot from the disk a choose if I waht to boot from windows 8 to go or another partition where I have my ghost.
I'm not sure how to go about making a dual boot when it is a USB harddisk.
I have a Dell Inspiron 17, 5000 Series (1.7 GHz Intel Pentium 3558U, 4 GB Ram, 500 GB HDD). It came preloaded with Windows 8.1. I needed Windows 7 so I partitioned the main drive and installed Windows 7 in 100 GB of partitioned space. After swapping between the Windows 7 and 8 Boot manager. Ended up choosing the Windows 8 manager.
My problem comes in when I boot into Windows 7, then when I shut down and try and boot into Windows 8 it will hang prior to the boot manager (of Windows 8). I have to press and hold the power button to hard shut down. Once I do that and reboot, Windows 8 Boot manager and Windows 8 boot ok.
So Windows 8 will boot fine if I was last in Windows 8. However if I was last booted in Windows 7 then go to Windows 8 (or try and boot into 7 again, but using the 8 boot manager) it will hang at boot. I've used all the command checks with Windows 7 and 8. Found no errors. I can't reinstall Windows 8 as I don't have recovery disks, plus the computer came from Aarons Rent to Own (they had no issues me doing what I wish with it).
When I switch and use the Windows 7 boot manager I can boot back into Windows 7 even if Windows 7 was my last boot. But like when using the Windows 8 boot manager, I am unable to boot into Windows 8 if Windows 7 was booted last. But Can boot to Windows 8 if Windows 8 was booted last.
I have new pc that has windows 8 pro installed. I would like to dual boot with windows 7 because certain software for work is not compatible with win 8. I was reading that I can create a vhd from windows 8, boot to the windows 7 installation media and install win 7 to the vhd, then I have the option to select win 7 or 8. Am I missing something here or is it as easy as this? Also do I need Win 7 ultimate or will he professional one work? I do not want to partition the hard drive.
View 9 Replies View RelatedI set up a dual boot with Windows 7 and 8 and it is extremely slow up until the Windows 7 and 8 appear. From that point on both load quickly. Also under the Windows 7 icon it says "recovered". Otherwise eveerything seems to be functioning normally.
View 9 Replies View RelatedWell, I had a dual booted machine booting Windows 8 and Ubuntu.
Windows 8 was starting to play up so I decided to completely reset the computer. I backed everything up, booted to Windows 8 and hit the 'Reset PC' button.
After answering some questions (full erase, whole disc etc), it informed me that it was going to restart. I clicked accept.
Short Story:
- Corrupted Windows 8 partition
- Corrupted Windows 8 recovery partition
Long Story:
Instead of rebooting back to anything, I got left sitting at a grub rescue prompt. From there I told it to boot windows 8.
I then spent five minutes staring at the booting screen. Nothing happened.
I powered off and tried again, this time pointing grub rescue at the windows 8 recovery loader partition. Well, initially that looked like it worked. I got the nice metro UI, and chose 'reset this PC' It then informed me that the recovery partition was missing some files. The only other option was to shut down.
I tried booting just plain windows 8 again, but had the same problem as before (nothing happening), And now when I try to boot the recovery loader, Grub tells me the EFI file isn't where it expects it to be. (Interestingly, how are you meant to boot to this without having a non-windows bootloader?)
Additional Details: Computer: HP Envy M6-1206TX. Pre-installed with Windows 8. Bought about 1 month, 1 week ago.
The Questions:
Since windows 8 came pre-installed, I don't have a Windows 8 disc, are there any possibilities for me to get back windows 8? (other than contacting the store I purchased it from)
After going through the license agreement, my interpretation is that I still have a license for Windows 8, but I am not under their limited warranty (due to dual booting). I do not wish to buy another license, as I already have one.
One last question:
If you acquired the software on a disc or other physical media, your proof of license is the genuine. Microsoft certificate of authenticity label with the accompanying genuine product key.
Neither my laptop, nor the box, nor any of the paperwork provided in it had this 'certificate of authenticity.' I suppose that means I have no legal rights to the software. Who's fault is this, HP, Microsoft, or the store I bought it from?
I have previously posted about the recommended Windows OS for my new laptop... and Then I decided to install Windows 8.1 Pro alongside my previously installed Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit)... Is it OK to install and dual-boot Windows 8.1 Pro with Windows 7 Ultimate?
And also tell me about the partition size allocations for both Windows, I have two partitions each of 24.7 GB for both the OSes, is this size worth applicable?
I have created dual boots before but in each case I did it the "usual" way by doing a fresh install of a second OS on a new drive (or new partition) and then letting the newest installation figure out how to arrange boot loaders or boot managers or whatever, i.e to figure out the dual boot parameters for me.
In this case I want to set up a dual boot using what is now 2 separate drives each with its own complete install of Windows. Of course, I can boot to one or the other by disconnecting the drive for the one I don't want to start up, but that is obviously a hassle.
Is there an easy way to set it up so that one of them (Win 8.1 pro) actually recognizes the other and asks me which one I want at boot up. I know if I re-install one of them I can do it, but I want to just set up the dual boot, and not touch either of the OS installations per se.
I have two hard drives One is a SSD and the other is a WD 64 MB cache 2 terabyte drive. I have Windows 7 installed on the SSD which works fine. I later, when I received it, installed Windows 8 on the other drive for a dual boot. It works, the screen comes up allowing me to choose between the OS's. Like I said picking 7 works fine but when I go into 8 it boots up, shows the Metro and is locked solid. I havent waited more than 5 mins but i get tired of it locking. I have 16 gigs of Kingston Ram, 2 ATI 6950 with combined 4 gigs. AMD 8 core and a ASUS motherboard. Everything was bought this year. Except for the Video cards. I am trying to update the ATI software but it is locked so i cant.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI've been doing the above ^^ for some time now. I've been using W8.1 as the main OS for my notebook. Yesterday I rebooted into Win7 to poke around. Every time that it said 'Starting Windows' it bluescreen (very rapidly) and restarted.
I tried the disc auto-repair, and this cut the bridge to W8.1 of course. When I tried Win7 it then said that there was another problem. The logon screen appeared, as if in safe mode, then produced numerous errors about being untable to log on or start logon services. I could not resolve this.
I eventually decided to try the manufacturer inbuilt restore of Win7 while leaving data alone. This seemed fine until it says 'preparing Windows for first use', then it said that the installation was interrupted (not by me or power use). I tried this several times but no use.
Shortened, I could not get back into Win8, I tried all the repairs, though it should only have been a bootloader issue, right? The Win8 bootloader will look back and see Win 7 and offer both. I formatted that partition, reinstalled Win8 on that partition, removed all data from the Win7 drive and then tried a complete reinstallation of the entire hard disk with the manufacturer restore disks. This worked.
I would like to poke around with W8.2 when it comes in the Spring. I need to understand what happened. My top two guesses are:
1. Minitool Partition manager, I suspected that program of being ... ruthless in hard drive partitioning and resizing in the past.
2. Perhaps some incompatibility coming from Win8?
Can you dual boot with Windows 8.1 Preview and OS X 10.8
View 6 Replies View Related