Dual boot windows 10 and 7 on separate drives

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  1. Posts : 2
    windows 10 and windows 7
       #1

    Dual boot windows 10 and 7 on separate drives


    I want to set up a dual boot system with windows 10 and 7. I have both already installed on separate drives in my desktop system and was wondering if it is still possible to set up a dual boot. Now I just switch boot priority in BIOS, but sometimes when I start up 7 it wants to perform a chkdsk. I always aboard these since it screwed up one of my drives before, with unrecoverable data as a result. How do I get it set up so I don't have those chkdsk issues anymore?
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  2. Posts : 18,421
    Windows 11 Pro
       #2

    You have to turn off Windows 10 Fast Startup:
    Fast Startup - Turn On or Off in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

    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.
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  3. Posts : 2
    windows 10 and windows 7
    Thread Starter
       #3

    NavyLCDR said:
    You have to turn off Windows 10 Fast Startup:
    Fast Startup - Turn On or Off in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

    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.
    Thank you very much! That was an easy and fast fix, very much appreciated!
      My Computer


  4. Posts : 12
    7 & 10
       #4

    NavyLCDR said:
    You have to turn off Windows 10 Fast Startup:
    Fast Startup - Turn On or Off in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

    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.
    I have the exact same problem (or so it seems). I was dual booting Win-7 Pro 64 on the 0-disk, Win- Home 32 on disk 2, Win-XP on disk 3 and a 1-TB backup drive on disk 1. I was not using any boot manager but just hitting F12 when I wanted to boot into something other than Win-7 pro. I took out the XP drive and installed Win-10 on a new disk after unplugging the other disks. Now I get a lot of check disks when I reboot. For now I have unplugged the win-10 disk until I find a solution. Will disabling fast-startup the be the solution by itself?

    Now I just want to slowly install programs to Win-10 to see what will and wont run on it. I only kept XP to use Winfax Pro but I haven't needed it in a while so I can probably just do without it for ever

    Dual boot windows 10 and 7 on separate drives-disk-mgnt.jpg
      My Computer


  5. Posts : 18,421
    Windows 11 Pro
       #5

    john1955 said:
    Now I get a lot of check disks when I reboot. For now I have unplugged the win-10 disk until I find a solution. Will disabling fast-startup the be the solution by itself?
    Probably will fix it. What happens is that fast startup saves certain information about the other drives in hiberfil.sys when the computer shuts down. Then on startup, instead of rediscovering all this information again, it just uses the information it retrieves from hiberfil.sys. Well, in between the shutdown and startup of Windows 10, if you run another OS, it will change some of that information on the other drives, but of course it won't change what is stored in the Windows 10 hiberfil.sys. When Windows 10 detects that the current state of the computer does not match what the data in hiberfil.sys says it should be, it can only assume the mismatch is because of a disk error, and thus flags the drive to be checked.
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  6. Posts : 12
    7 & 10
       #6

    NavyLCDR said:
    Probably will fix it. What happens is that fast startup saves certain information about the other drives in hiberfil.sys when the computer shuts down. Then on startup, instead of rediscovering all this information again, it just uses the information it retrieves from hiberfil.sys. Well, in between the shutdown and startup of Windows 10, if you run another OS, it will change some of that information on the other drives, but of course it won't change what is stored in the Windows 10 hiberfil.sys. When Windows 10 detects that the current state of the computer does not match what the data in hiberfil.sys says it should be, it can only assume the mismatch is because of a disk error, and thus flags the drive to be checked.
    This happens when I boot into the older OS's after exiting Win-10 and it's wanting to sometimes check all the drives including my backup drive. But I will try it and see what happens. I dont use hibernation on any OS but it somehow got turned on on the Windows 7 home recently. As you can see I only have 3% space remaining and when I looked into it there was a hyberfile on that disk that was never there before. Grrrrr!
      My Computer


  7. Posts : 18,421
    Windows 11 Pro
       #7

    john1955 said:
    This happens when I boot into the older OS's after exiting Win-10 and it's wanting to sometimes check all the drives including my backup drive. But I will try it and see what happens. I dont use hibernation on any OS but it somehow got turned on on the Windows 7 home recently. As you can see I only have 3% space remaining and when I looked into it there was a hyberfile on that disk that was never there before. Grrrrr!
    powercfg -h off

    That will turn off Hibernation and Fast Startup and delete the hiberfil.sys file. Works on Windows 7, 8 and 10, not sure about XP.
      My Computer


  8. Posts : 12
    7 & 10
       #8

    NavyLCDR said:
    powercfg -h off

    That will turn off Hibernation and Fast Startup and delete the hiberfil.sys file. Works on Windows 7, 8 and 10, not sure about XP.
    So far so good . . . I had only one limited chkdsk run on the Windows 10 disk. Multiple boots into all systems have been without a hitch since then

    - - - Updated - - -

    I have a new problem. I now have Windows Boot Manager listed in my BIOS and another drive not listed making it impossible to set the correct boot order. The WBM was never in my BIOS before now (I knew installing Win-10 would get interesting haha) . So my question is how do I get rid of the Boot Manager in BIOS or else how can I get my other two OS's on the Boot Manager? I prefer to not use Boot Manager because I don't want to be prompted every time I boot, I just want it to boot into Win-7 Pro by default. This is a Gigabyte GA-Z77-HD3 if it matters.

    Another thing is that I have two SSD's that are SATA drives but Windows 10 is listed as UEFI. Does that have to be, or was it an option I missed on install?

    As long as I'm asking . . . why is my Backup Drive with no operating system on it set as ACTIVE with a bootmgr file on it?

    (Should this be a new thread?)
      My Computer


  9. Posts : 4,594
    Windows 10 Pro
       #9

    Did you have it plugged in when you did a OS install ?
      My Computers


  10. Posts : 12
    7 & 10
       #10

    AddRAM said:
    Did you have it plugged in when you did a OS install ?
    It may have been on the first installation attempt of windows 10 but it was not when I reformatted and reinstalled a second time.
      My Computer


 

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