I have Windows 8 installed on 2 Samsung SSDs - one is 840 Pro and the other is 840 Evo. This is because I work on both video and music production and would like to keep things separate.
At first I tried cloning an "old" SSD on to both Pro and Evo to make life easy, but it was a total mess:
I would boot Windows 8 on either Evo or Pro, and before the password prompt, Windows would fire up a Checkdisk on one (or more) of the 5 HD I have (please find the logs and disklayout in the attachments).
This would usually happen if for eg, I'm working on Evo and then I restart to work on Pro - or vice-versa.
But sometimes I would be working on either one of them, and this flag notification would popup asking me to restart because Windows needs to perform a diskcheck.
What is strange to me is that if I do a manual diskcheck (right-click -> Properties -> Tools), it would complete it, the notification disappears but would return a second or two later.
There was a minor issue where for eg, some options in the Control Panel were still pointing to drive H: which before the cloning, was my original C: drive.
Otherwise all software was working perfectly fine.
So I decided to do a clean re-install on both Pro and Evo hoping to solve this diskcheck issue once and for all.
This was 10 days ago, and for the past 10 days I had used almost exclusively the Evo drive. Today I need to work on Pro but Windows wouldn't get past the diskcheck and on to the password prompt.
It's saying "Preparing for Repair", then changes to "Diagnosing your PC" but then this blue screen pops up asking me to choose between Shut Down or Advanced Options.
This happened on rare occasions, but before the fresh install, I would do this perhaps a couple of times in a row (i.e. go to the blue screen Advanced Options and click Exit and Continue to Windows 8) restart, and it would eventually go past the diskcheck and allow me to log in and work. But today it just won't do it.
EDIT: I don't know if it matters but as it is now, it automatically boots up on Pro unless I hit F12 and choose to boot on Evo. But as I said earlier I had only been using Evo for the past 10 days since the re-install.
Attached please find the Srt logfiles which I found by following a path shown to me on that blue screen.
The strange thing is that the path started with drive H: and why drive H: and not C: (i.e. the Pro drive, being the current Windows boot drive). But when I booted on Evo, and went on drive J: (the drive letter that Pro is assigned when I'm on Evo), I found the logfiles there.
Is it possible to have two hard drives in the computer and to be able to choose which one to start with ?
I have in mind that one hard drive has all my normal programs and the other is used for Flight simulation program.
Both hard drives would have win 8 installed. If I could use one hard drive and partition it so the flight sim is on a separate partition. However, for two reasons I wouldn't want this as the flight sim with scenery requires a lot of Gigs. and secondly I believe that it would run faster on its own hard drive.
So. Is it possible to set up the computer to decide which Drive I wish to start ? and if so, how to set it up ?
I have Win 7 on a 60gb ssd hard drive. I would like to put another 60gb ssd drive in my computer and run win 8 off of this. Is it possible to run this as a dual boot system. Will I get the option to boot into either when I boot up.
I currently have a machine installed with Windows 8 pro 64 bit installed on one Samsung 840 pro SSD. Works great. I recently added a second Crucial m4 SSD and would like to install Linux on it... I am having major issues doing so mainly because of UEFI... and when installing Linux it does not see Windows 8 installed on any drive therefore making it rather difficult to install both OSes.
I just bought this Dell XPS 8500 with Win 8 on it and although I'm not that happy with this OS I guess there is a learning curve so I'll try for awhile.
For some reason, after I had uninstalled Mcafee from the start up screen and also added a few items to the startup screen, when I reboot or do a cold boot, instead of getting the startup screen, I am getting the desktop along with about 5 disk partitions and a couple programs that I installed. While this is not bad since I can just "x" out of them, it's irritating and wonder how I can fix this. I would like to ultimately just boot up to the desktop if possible without anything else opening up.
Currently I have a machine with Windows 8 pre-installed already. But now I don't like Windows 8 as much because certain programs I want to use requires Windows 7. Though I would still like to keep Windows 8 because it's licensed. I have an extra hard drive lying around with Windows 7 loaded in it already. Now I would like to dual boot between these two drives. Do I have to turn off Secure Boot and change the boot orders around to boot the Windows 7 hard drive?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Just installed 8.1 on one of my machines. The 100 mb "system reserved" boot partition is showing up as drive E in the drives. It does not show on my other Win 8 machine. Why would this be? Is there some way to hide it?
I've tried everything. Basically it wont boot when using a USB 3.0 flash drive (which is faster than the external usb 3 hard drive am using) It simply stalls on the boot image part (The blue windows icon). And on my laptop it gives a blue screen type error. Yet wont let me boot into safe mode when using flash drive. However when I use external drive it works fine although the performance isn't great.
At first I though it could have been an issue with the boot/350mb partition so I copied that over. Still the same. I have also tried a fresh windows to go install with same results.
USB Stick: Patriot USB 3 45MB Write/160MB Read USB HDD: External Case (USB3) With Toshiba 7200 Laptop Drive (ASMT 2105)
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 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.
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 had windows 7 installed and i installed windows 8 on my other partition and after some days i did a format on win7 partition but the dual boot menu is still there any solution to remove that ?
I'm having a hard time with WinPE 4.0. For starters, my USB is 128GB, which means I have to use exFAT - according to some people, it should work, but others say it won't. So far no luck.
Also, it's my only USB and any way to boot both x86 and x64 WinPE 4.0 from it. Even if I have to use separate partitions, that would be fine.
Finally, I have to do this in UEFI mode.... BIOS won't work on the device I'm trying to boot to.
I have an older tower running W8.1 update 1 and Wxp - each OS is on a separate hard drive, when I boot the computer I get the choice of booting to W8.1 or earlier OS. I am now ready to remove the XP drive and delete all the information, my question is:
Is there a proper method to remove the choice of OS on the boot screen, or will it be removed if I just remove the hard drive with XP on it?
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.
I 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.
Well, 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?
Didn't plan ahead Dual boot Windows 7 and 8. I only initially allowed 100 GB for my primary Windows 8 on a 2 TB drive. I'm hardly using the W-7 and now find myself out of space on the W-8 (C) I'd like to repartition to give (C) 1 TB and 1 TB for (D)
My Old laptop died. Not a Harddrive issue it functions fine. I had Vista installed. I now have a new HP ENVY DV7. I would like to set up my new system to allow booting from either my old hard drive, or my new system. How to accomplish this?
So, previously I had Windows 8 and a system image of that drive. I want to dual-boot it with Win7, so I replace my Win8 with Win7, and reinstall Win8 on another partition. Can I restore my Win8 with the previous system image, or will it affect my Win7?
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.
When dual/multi booting with previous versions of Windows, you have your basic black screen w/white text and when choosing your OS to boot to, you have to use the up/down arrows and hit enter.
With the visually nice boot menu screen of Windows 8, you can actually use your mouse to choose your OS, just click the OS you want. Saves a few seconds by not using the keyboard.
