Did clean install of Win 10 on SSD - Want to put Win 7 on hard drive

Samuria said:

The simple answer is to use Oracle VM VirtualBox its free and you dont need to mess with paritions and boot it just run as a virtual pc and you can run any other o/s like linux, win95 etc

Where do I download Oracle VM VirtualBox to...the SSD or the hard drive?

NavyLCDR said:

If you are wanting to clean install Windows 7 to the HDD, then you disconnect the SSD, and boot the computer from the Windows 7 USB flash drive. After Windows 7 is installed on the HDD, reconnect the SSD and boot the computer from it, run the BCDBOOT command to add the Windows 7 to the boot menu on the SSD.

I installed Windows 7 on the hard drive after I disconnected the SSD. I just noticed that the drive letter for Windows 7 is C: - the same as my SSD Windows 10 OS. Now what?

Moolah said:

I installed Windows 7 on the hard drive after I disconnected the SSD. I just noticed that the drive letter for Windows 7 is C: - the same as my SSD Windows 10 OS. Now what?

That is normal. When you boot Windows 7 it will assign C as the letter for the boot partition. Whatever system you are running gets assigned C.

You can carry on with what @NavyLCDR said in post 3 - plug in your SSD, boot into Windows 10 and run the bcdboot command. When you boot 10 it will assign C as the letter for the Windows 10 boot partition and it will assign some other letter for the Windows 7 one on the HDD. Most likely this will be E in which case:

NavyLCDR said:

Let's say it gets drive letter E:\. Right click on the start icon, select Command Prompt (Admin). In the command prompt window run:

BCDBOOT E:\Windows /d /addlast

The path in red will be the drive letter Windows 10 gives to the second OS partition and the Windows folder of that partition.

You might want to rename the boot menu entries "Windows 7" and "Windows 10" for clarity (I can't remember the default names) but you can do that after if you want to - it isn't required.

This may also help.

You have both the Windows 10 SSD and the Windows 7 HDD connected at the same time, right? Your disk management shows a 1TB HDD connected. Is that just a storage drive you have connected (because with the single partition on it, that is what it looks like). Do you also have a good power lead connected to the Windows 7 HDD? Are both the power lead and SATA cable solidly attached to the hard drive and the SATA cable to the motherboard?

NavyLCDR said:

You have both the Windows 10 SSD and the Windows 7 HDD connected at the same time, right? Your disk management shows a 1TB HDD connected. Is that just a storage drive you have connected (because with the single partition on it, that is what it looks like). Do you also have a good power lead connected to the Windows 7 HDD? Are both the power lead and SATA cable solidly attached to the hard drive and the SATA cable to the motherboard?

Yes, they both are connected. I moved all the files I had on the HDD to an external hard drive and then formatted it, which took an hour, before installing Windows 7 on it.

I reinstalled Windows 7 on it again and after it installed it checked the disk and deleted some files and has been recovering orphaned files for over 10 minutes now, and still running, something I have never seen. before. What does this mean?

Moolah said:

Yes, they both are connected. I moved all the files I had on the HDD to an external hard drive and then formatted it, which took an hour, before installing Windows 7 on it.

I reinstalled Windows 7 on it again and after it installed it checked the disk and deleted some files and has been recovering orphaned files for over 10 minutes now, and still running, something I have never seen. before. What does this mean?

Sounds like something didn't go right. When you installed Windows 7, did you click on the custom install option, which should have given you a list off all the partitions on the hard drive. Then click on each partition listed and click delete. You would have been left with 1 big unallocated space. Then select the unallocated space and click next to let Windows setup create the partitions it wants and install Windows. Doing this with the SSD disconnected.

NavyLCDR said:

Sounds like something didn't go right. When you installed Windows 7, did you click on the custom install option, which should have given you a list off all the partitions on the hard drive. Then click on each partition listed and click delete. You would have been left with 1 big unallocated space. Then select the unallocated space and click next to let Windows setup create the partitions it wants and install Windows. Doing this with the SSD disconnected.

Yes, I clicked Custom Install, but didn't really pay attention to the hard drive for partitions because there wasn't any on it to start with. I am pretty sure it was all unallocated space. I did all this with the SSD disconnected from the motherboard. It is still recovering orphaned files. Can I turn my computer off and run chkdsk on the hard drive and then format it again and reinstall Windows 7?

It stopped & I plugged the SSD back in & attached what is on Drive D

When dual booting, Windows 10 fast startup should be turned off - sometimes this causes problems when booting into Windows 7:
Fast Startup - Turn On or Off in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

If it were my computer, I would turn off Windows 10 fast startup. Shut down. Disconnect the SSD. Reinstall Windows 7 to the HDD, this time make sure to delete all the partitions on the hard drive and install to the unallocated space. Then reconnect the SSD as first SATA, HDD as second SATA. Then do the BCD boot command after booting into Windows 10.

For one thing - when doing a clean install to a completely unallocated drive, there should be more than 1 partition created on it and it looked like you only had 1 partition on the hard drive.

I would do that just to make sure there weren't any problems lurking that would become major problems later. Obviously something went wrong with the first attempt.