Dual Boot 10 and 8.1 massacre

Ok so I have Windows 10 on my laptop. Upgraded at launch from 7. I'm beginning to build my own pc and wanted to try my old 8.1 iso, to see if it would still work. Plus just wanted something to do.

I made a 45 gig partition of allocated space on my main disk. I booted from the USB and successfully installed 8.1. I then restarted and went back into Windows 10. Which I was on for the rest of the evening. I didn't need to do anything else with 8.1 so I was going to just get rid of it. I did so the same way that I've done with various Linux distro's in the past.

I went into easy BCD and removed the boot process. And then I went into disk management And deleted the partition. And then extended my C back to full space.

I restarted my computer and my heart stopped because the screen that came up said recovery, your PC/device needs to be repaired. I press enter to try again and nothing happens. I press F8 for start up settings and nothing happens. I've been waiting for something like this to happen. But it always sucks when it does.

I think in messing with everything I somehow made my computer forget how to boot up windows 10. Because I went through the start up and the hard disk test and both of them passed. So I think it's still there and fine. I just don't know how to get to it.

I have a system image recovery disk USB which I put in and tried to boot from and it tells me that I can continue to Windows 8.1. Which doesn't make sense because the recovery image was from windows 10. So it's like all confused and I'm freaking out.

I'm really new at all of this internal tinkering stuff and I would really appreciate any help. Kind of a nervous wreck. Thank you.

Oh damn. Seriously... Is there nothing I can do in bios or anything to reach?

Also I won't have a copy of 10 since upgraded from the 7 that came with. I can use other means but didn't want to.

Thanks for the response.

Windows 10 ISO file can be downloaded in the following 2 Official sites :

Tech Bench
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...brrWLRbagYCa0w)()

Media creation Tool (MCT)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/soft...load/windows10

My recommendation is to use Tech Bench link.

There are plenty of ways of fixing the no-boot problem without a clean install of Windows 10.

If you have an operating computer, make a bootable USB flash drive of Kyhi's recovery disk:
Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk - Windows 10 Forums

Boot the computer from his rescue disk, run Macrium Reflect Free. Under the restore menu will be a utility to fix Windows startup problems. Start with that.

The advantage to using Kyhi's recovery drive is that it also has other troubleshooting tools available if Macrium Reflect Free doesn't work, like MiniTool Partition Wizard that we can use to see if there is still an EFI or System Reserved partition on the hard drive, EasyBCD so we can see what is in the BCD if there is one on the hard drive, and command prompt that we can use to run BCDBOOT to add the Windows installation to an existing BCD if we need to.

Ok awesome. I don't have have another available computer unfortunately. Will need to figure something out. Thank you so much for info. I'll let you guys know when I'm able.

ModestMice21 said:

Ok awesome. I don't have have another available computer unfortunately. Will need to figure something out. Thank you so much for info. I'll let you guys know when I'm able.

What's wrong with the computer you are using now to reply to us ?