Dual boot windows 10 and 7 on separate drives

Hello and thanks for having me on the forum. Not too tech savvy and have a question.

Windows 7 user on PC DELL 8700 XPS. I added another drive and and installed W10. All working well.

I would like to set up dual boot. I can do it now by hitting F12 and choosing my OS.

Currently set to boot to W10 located on Disk 2. Disk 0 is the W7 OS.

Disk 1 is an internal hard drive I use for backups and files.

Do I have to assign a drive letter to Disk 0 before I can enable dual boot? and than do BCDBOOT E:\Windows /addlast /d

I saw this in an old thread:

To set up dual booting, in Windows 10, assuming you can see the Windows 7 installation on the other drive, open an elevated ("run as administrator") command prompt. Type

BCDBOOT E:\Windows /addlast /d

The path in red will be to the Windows 7 Windows folder.

You can then set your menu timeout, order of the boot items, and default by holding Win key + R to open run dialog. Run MSCONFIG. Select the boot tab.

This tutorial may be useful:
Dual Boot Windows 10 with Windows 7 or Windows 8


In case you choose to return to single boot:
How to Remove and Uninstall Windows 7, 8, or 10 from Dual Boot PC

Thanks for the advice zbook.

I assigned a drive letter and used EasyBCD and all is good.

That's great news.

You're welcome.

DBD -- the way you installed everything is exactly the way I do it, and personally I would not alter that method. Installing the different OSs on separate drives keeps them completely independent from each other, so that booting an OS is not contingent on the health of a different drive. Or if you just decide to swap something out, you can do it without jumping through hoops. Even on separate drives, I find it best to unplug all the other drives when installing an OS. I once had a machine with two drives, Windows on one and Linux on the other, and I installed the Linux without removing the drive with Windows on it -- later, I decided to upgrade that second drive, but when I pulled it out, Windows would no longer start... until I figured out how to go in and fix the MBR. In your case, let's say you set the Win 10 drive to hold the bootloader for both, and then the Win 10 drive fails. (And with today's SSDs, there is no warning, no slowness, no clicking, it just suddenly stops working.) You would then be unable to boot the Win 7 drive, without first repairing it.

I actually take it one step further on my main rig, I have four drives -- one with Win 10 and one with Ubuntu, independent of each other (on Asus mobos, you use F8 to get to the boot override menu), one drive for just my data (auto-saves for everything go to drive D), and another just for backups. Everything completely independent and portable. (Linux actually uses a bootloader which recognizes the Windows installation and allows you to choose it during boot, without it changing anything in the Windows boot files.)

HI,
Why is disk 1 dynamic ?

DualBootDummy said:

That's a great question and I don't have the answer. Maybe I should use DynamicDiskDummy for for my username. Lol

I think at one time I was going to use that disk for a RAID setup??? and chose dynamic. Do you think it should be basic?

Hi,
Should be basic/ logical like the others.

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
Should be basic/ logical like the others.

That makes sense. Is there any reason it shouldn't remain dynamic? The reason I ask is because it looks like I will loose my data when making it basic. I know I can simply backup first. Thanks.

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This is better.

Much better. Always good to have the disks all one way or all the other. Less confusing for your OS kernel.