I think he means the one time bios boot menu that will pop up if you press something f12 or whatever.
Then select which HD to boot from.
That is one way of doing it. The advantage of that is you could take out one disk and still boot into the other, and vice versa.
You can do both:
Unplug the win7 disk while installing. Then add a bcd entry on the win7 disk pointing at the new installation on the other disk, and vice versa.
I went with the advice that if I did not unplug the Windows 7 disc, I would get a dual boot menu when the PC starts, but I don't. Don't really want to wipe Win10, now it's installed and activated.Unplug the win7 disk while installing.
Can I use EasyBCD somehow to create a boot menu (a screen that comes up automatically giving me the option, before a set timeout, to go into one O/S or the other; not one that gets me into the BIOS or whatever)? As I think I said, I did this on another PC some years ago for a Win7/WinXP dual boot, and that still works fine, with a O/S choice screen showing every time I start the PC.
[QUOTE=NavyLCDR;177539 Next use a program such as MiniTool Partition Wizard Free to copy your existing Windows 7 partition to the empty partition. Give the destination partition a new drive letter, let's call it T:. Once that is done, open a command prompt with administrator privileges and run the command to add the second OS to the boot menu:
bcdboot T:\Windows /d /addlast
That assumes your second Windows is T: drive. Just use whatever drive letter you assigned to it.[/QUOTE]
I've dual booted on several computers in the past & never ran into any problems until having to reinstall Win 10. I hope you can help me.
It depends. Is your win7 on an mbr disk and your win10 on a gpt disk?
If so, you can add a boot menu entry to the bcd store on the gpt disk that points at the win7 partition on the other disk.
So if the win10 disk is first in boot order, you will get the windows boot menu from which you can select. If you do it that way, then your win7 will boot under efi even if it is installed on an mbr disk. This is what I am doing atm .
If they are both gpt disks, then you can also add an entry to the bcd store on win7 disk pointing at win10 partition on the other disk.
I don't think easybcd works very well under efi ( if that is what you are using). Probably better to use cmd prompt and bcdboot.exe. Or you could use bootice if you are familiar with it.
Thanks for the replies. I had the MBR/GTP issue but as both partitions on the disk were empty, I just deleted them, and started again.
I am still far from out of the woods though (and starting to get depressed with all the problems I am now seeing). I followed advice on these forums to get dual boot enabled in Windows 10 and Windows 7 and now I do get the Windows Boot Manager (black screen with 2 Windows options, and memory diagnostic) at startup.However, every time I boot, Checkdisk starts up. I let it run and in the Windows 10 partition it made a lot of changes, like this:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...4-2d80e426dcfa
("Deleting extended attribute set . . .")
Now I can - eventually - still get into Windows 7 (Checkdisk runs every time I boot. Why? How many time does it need to scan the same partitions?), but if I choose the Windows 10 option, I am told that PC can't boot into Windows 10 and that I will need to repair the installation. Can only be Checkdisk that has 'destroyed' it, as it was at least booting OK earlier.
I was 99% sure before I started that I would get all these problems - I always do, whereas most others report having 'no problems'. Computers hate me, it seems....I guess I am going to have to load the Win10 installation disc and go through a repair?
Won't Checkdisk just do the same thing again though? There is a post at the end of the thread linked above that says
"Disable fast startup in Windows 10. This mode is hibernate like that leaves the disk in a state that Windows 7 does not understand. This causes it to run CHKDSK.
Win 10 install - lots of reparse errors on CHKDSK
But now of course I can't get into Windows 10 in order to disable Fast Startup
- - - Updated - - -
OK, feeling totally miserable with all this now. I had to reinstall Windows 10 afresh.. now I do get a dual boot screen and can boot into Win10 OK. If I choose Windows 7 though at the boot screen, the PC hangs, with nothing coming up on the screen. Can't get into Windows 7 at all. What has gone wrong now? Surely I don't need to repair Windows 7 now? Must be some other way?
(I did disable fast start up in Windows 10, in Group Policy Editor, (as advised) so I am not getting Chkdsk at least
Thanks.
Last edited by martinlest; 26 Nov 2019 at 12:18.
Virtual machines come with substantially lower performance to the OS that is in the virtual machine.
I tried Windows XP Mode on my Windows 7 Professional (basically XP in a VM) - so laggy I couldn't even play Pinball - and this is a 4th gen i7 laptop. Ended up sticking with XP on physical hardware (old Core 2 Duo laptop).
Only use a VM unless you have no other choice. If you can dual boot, then dual boot - my Windows 7 and 10 dual boot has been fine (apart from 10 being a bit cranky, but that's Windows 10 for you).
As the OP, I'll just add a little postscript..
I much appreciate the technical help posted by various people here, but though I followed instructions to the letter (although not a 'guru', I'm far from being computer illiterate!), I ended up with a PC that would at best boot into one O/S or the other (at worst, neither).
In the end I did what I should have done at the start: having no further suggestions here, I deleted the dual boot in Windows 10 via msconfig (doing which meant I could then access Windows 7 and do the same there), I let EasyBCD set up the dual boot configuration. It worked immediately (bless it!) and is still working at the time I write this (though who knows what tomorrow may bring!?).
I then added iReboot (an nifty little addon I use on my other Win7/XP dual boot PC) and I am now very happy with the result. The boot into Windows 10 seems a bit slow compared to Windows 7 (the default O/S on this PC), but I can have a look at that a bit later.
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