Install Windows 8.1 Dual Boot On A Separate Partition?
Jul 5, 2013
I have made my Windows 8.1 DVD, but I haven't committed to installing it yet.
I'd like to just install it on a separate partition on my second hard drive.
Normally I wouldn't hesitate to just go ahead and install it, but I'm not sure if the new Uefi bios will just except it and automatically set up the dual boot menus etc, the way that it did in the past.
Are there extra steps that I need to take before going ahead with the install.
I definitely don't want to replace my current Windows 8 install until the final version comes online at that time I will probably do a complete new install of all my software.
I currently have windows 8 installed. I wish to install another windows 8 os on a separate hdd on the same pc. I wish to do this because I share this pc with my brother who is paranoid that my constant tweaking somehow breaks his games installs. Is dual booting two windows 8 installations possible? If it is, what is the best way of going about it? I have an external hard drive that I backup all of my partitions to using acronis, so I'm not too worried about breaking something.
I'm trying to dual boot Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and Windows 8 Pro. I want to have each OS installed on separate Hard drives. I want the default OS to be Windows 7 (loads automatically) or goes to the boot manager screen and choose either Win 7 and Win 8.
I've been running Windows 7 on an SSD hard drive with a UEFI Boot. I'm looking to install Windows 8 on a WD Caviar Black 1 TB drive.
Steps taken:
-Burnt Windows 8 to DVD to boot and install from. -Re-ordered boot order to boot from DVD -Windows 8 install starts -Windows 8 drive screen - format the WD Caviar Black 1 TB to install Windows 8 on. -ERROR Message appears - Can't find media location (I didn't write it down but will on next install I will update). Something like 0x00007B. The solution I found was to disconnect my Windows 7 drive (and all other hard drives).
(Issue: won't that affect the set up of the dual boot?)
-Disconnected Windows 7 drive and was able to install Windows 8. -After successful install of Windows 8 I re-started my system expecting to see the dual boot menu options. However, Windows 8 loaded directly. -Changed boot drive order to SSD (with Windows 7) then WD 1TB Drive (with Windows 8). However, Windows 7 then loaded directly. -I rebooted into Windows 8 and went to the boot order menu in Settings > Control Panel > System > Startup and Restore > (might be a few other tabs). The drop down box shows Windows 8 but no Windows 7.
So, I'm sure I did something wrong on the install. Any thoughts?
If the SSD is a UEFI boot should the WD 1TB (Win 8 install drive) be the same? Is it critical to have the Windows 8 drive connected while installing Windows 8 to the other hard drive? If so, I will have to solve the error message I get after formatting the WD 1TB drive during the Win 8 install. (I know not having the specific error code doesn't work - will update tonight with that info).
Also, I have a 2TB drive that I think has a MBR partition. Would that affect things? Should I even have that? I'll confirm that too. Just hoping to possibly get the ball rolling with answers.
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.
which partition holds Windows 8 on my Dual Boot 7/8 system. I want to delete Windows 8 64 bit and reinstall Windows 8 32 bit, then update to Windows 8.1. I'm doing this because the system's old enough that 64 bit 8.1 won't install but maybe 32 bit will. I won't know unless I try.
I need to figure out which partition Windows 8 is on so I can format the drive and reinstall.
I dual-booted Vista and Win 8. I created a small ~20GB partition where I have my Windows 8 Release Preview. Now I really like it, because Vista is really slow compared to any other OS. Windows 8 is blazing fast, but I have programs on my Vista partition. I make music so I use Ableton Live for that. When I tried to launch Ableton in Windows 8 by browsing through the Vista partition, it wants to install itself and authorize again. If I was on Windows 7 64-bit I would use the Laplink PCMover but I am on Vista 32-bit. Is there a way I could transfer my programs to Windows 8? (They're all 32-bit if it matters...) Like use some backup & restore thing or anything??
I used to have System Reserved on separate partion to C: but on my last fresh re-install, I decided to make C: and System Reserved in one partition. Here's what shows on Disk Management:
My question is, which is better. System Reserved on the same partition with C: or on a separate partition?
I have dual-booted Windows 8.1 and Windows 7. I have managed to free up a significant amount of space on Windows 7 and was wondering if it's possible to add some of the freed space to my Windows 8.1 partition?
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I've recently installed a dual boot, Windows 7 and Windows 8. The installation went fine but then after a very short time my Windows 8 Screen goes black. I had to press the power button to exit.
I've checked the Power settings and ensured the "Turn off display" was "never". I also updated my Video drivers thinking that might be the problem. Both to no avail. I've done a "Refresh" and a "Reset (which took 3 hrs). Again, all was fine for a short time, but while exploring the OS, again the black screen.
I followed... re-formatting the hard drive during the new installation, trying generic video drivers and doing Resets and Refreshes. None of that worked and still doesn't. The installations do complete as before, but I don't have enough time to download new updates to perhaps correct whatever problem(s) there are before all goes black after a few minutes. As I stated before I have to hold down the power button to exit.
If this is a clue, once the screen goes black and I revert back to Window7, before loading, the File System on ALL drives, including C and the Windows 8 partition has to check for consistency before Windows 7 boots up.
I've been quite busy and haven't had a chance to try re-installing again until now. Thinking the problem might have been the actual drive I used for previous attempts (it was a SATA external drive which by the way I previously used for a dual boot Vista/with Win7), I then created new partitions on 2 different USB connected external drives and attempted to install. It wouldn't do the install on either one. I received messages "Setup does not support disks connected through USB or Firewire,.... my USB drives are connected directly to computer not a hub. So I'm forced to use the SATA created partitions for the installations. (Disk 1)
If it makes a difference, through Disk Management, I've deleted the Windows 8 installs from those partitions then re-created a "New Simple Volume" before trying again. I even tried creating another partition on C but it wouldn't allow an installation saying it was a dynamic drive. Prior to me creating that additional C partition all were Primary but now they're all Simple Volumes as per the color codes.
I have two OEM Windows 8 installation disks, I've tried both.
I have a sony vaio vpcyb3v1e. I have windows 8.1 installed and i tried using a bootable usb to install as multi boot, the xp black edition on a separate partition. After doing that i couldn't be able to login in the windows 8.1 OS. I got the message Load needed DLLS for kernel.
I have a question on the best way to install Windows 7 as a dual boot on an existing Windows 8 installation on a new Asus Laptop. Most of the tutorials I've seen assume the pre-existing installation is Windows 7, and say that Windows 7 needs to be installed first, not an option when your Windows 8 comes pre-installed.
I have an Asus F75, and here is the partitioning: 1. 300 MB EFI System Partition, FAT32 2. 900 MB NTFS Recovery Partition (would seem to be the MS Reserved partition, is that correct?) 3. 279 GB NTFS OS Partition 4. 398 GB NTFS Data Partition 5. 20 GB NTFS Recovery Partition
It sounds like after installing Windows 7, the boot menu will be the Win7 text boot selection menu if you use that as the default OS, which is what I plan on doing, so I believe there isn't anything I need to do to that, is that correct?
I have turned of Fast Boot in Windows 8, and disabled Secure Boot in the system BIOS.
What should I do about the existing Data partition, which will be the Win7 partition. Should I:
a. Leave that intact and simply install Win7 to it, or b. Delete the partition, install Win7 and allow the install to manage the unallocated space?
Do I have any other considerations other than collecting all the Win 7 drivers for the laptop (which I have already done)?
I have my system reserved partition attached with my personal partition and i have a lot of useful data in it.
Because of it i'm not able to format system reserved at start to avoid boot loader asking me wether you want to choose between windows 8 or the earlier version of windows.
How can I seperate system reserved from my partition .
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?
I read an article saying that some Windows version updates will choke if the user folders are located on a separate partition. Any problems upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 when their user folders on located on a partition other than the c: drive?
I actually installed the Android on Intel Architecture onto my Samsung xe700t a few times over the last few months, adjusting windows 8 or android options to suit my needs, but a few days ago I decided to format my laptop and reinstall Windows 8 and reinstall Android as I have previously, I am now getting this error message at the very end of the android installation process:
I have updated the bios, I have made sure my laptop is in UEFI format, I have made secure the BIOS isn't in secure boot, I have tried various USB sticks, I have also made sure the USB stick is first in the boot order.
So why I can't install Intel Android onto my pc anymore ...
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 win 8 pro installed & two HDDs with two partions each , I want to migrate the boot partition to another partition on the second drive .
It would have been easier if i would have just cloned the complete drives but one of the partions on the 2nd drive has data which cannot be deleted .
So I have Drive
1 - Partitions C: ( boot partition ) & D:
Drive 2 - Partitions E: & F:
I want to remove Drive 1 from my PC so i want to copy C: to E: then remove drive 1 & boot from E:
I tried "Easeus todo backup" , did not work, it does not make the copy bootable , to make it bootale the whole drive has to be copied .
I tried making an image of C: using Windows 8 inbuilt backup feature then removed drive 1 , installed Windows 8 on E: then tried restoring the image of C: but i got some error.
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.
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 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.
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.
