Dual boot woes

You already have created the other partiton for 7 to install into? You shouldnt have to do any thing other than install 7 normally on the other partition, and Windows should sort out the boot menu for you.

Here is a good guide from LifeHacker

Originally Posted by SIW2

Hi johnathan,

If Vista is the System partition , and you are currently booting into it, you may find this does the trick:

Open an elevated command prompt and type: ( press enter after each command)

bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Windows 7"

It will return a long number, a GUID, in brackets. Use that , including the brackets, in the following commands:

bcdedit /set {THE-GUID-YOU-GOT} device partition=D:

bcdedit /set {THE-GUID-YOU-GOT} osdevice partition=D:

Close cmd prompt.

If you have any more questions, please post a screenshot of the Disk Management window, and also of bcdedit command window ( just type bcdedit into an elevated cmd prompt , press enter - and the entries will be displayed).

You should see the Vista and the 7 entries under the bootloader heading.

This assumes that my Windows 7 is in the D:\?

Originally Posted by loathe

You already have created the other partiton for 7 to install into? You shouldnt have to do any thing other than install 7 normally on the other partition, and Windows should sort out the boot menu for you.

Hi there, thanks for reply.

Not really sure what you mean but originally I have 2 hard disks. The first HD is used to install my OS while the second is for data storage. When I decide to install W7, I used Disk Management in Vista to Shrink my first HD. This produced C:\ (Vista) and another unallocated space. I left that space as unallocated. So at the moment I have C:\, unallocated space, and D:\ (Data storage).

I reboot into W7 installation DVD and select unallocated space to install W7. However, after the installation it seems that I will only get to boot into W7. There's no boot menu selection.

Originally Posted by loathe

Here is a good guide from LifeHacker

That's the guide I used :P Followed exactly his steps but I installed W7 from a USB key instead.

edit: Hmmm, *might* have skipped creating the "New Simple Volume" bit... I think I just formatted the partition into NTFS...
Well off to work now! Keep the suggestions coming! Hopefully I will find a solution when I get off work later!

Take care and thanks for any help offered!!!

Originally Posted by jonathanc

That's the guide I used :P Followed exactly his steps but I installed W7 from a USB key instead.

edit: Hmmm, *might* have skipped creating the "New Simple Volume" bit... I think I just formatted the partition into NTFS...
Well off to work now! Keep the suggestions coming! Hopefully I will find a solution when I get off work later!

Take care and thanks for any help offered!!!

You dont really need to format the partiton there, you can do it at install. Im not sure why its not working for you.

Posting a screenshot of the Disk Management window will be a great help, like this:

Attachment 1130

NOTE: The commands in my previous post are for when C is the Vista partition and D is the 7 partition - as seen when booted into Vista.

I'm classified as a beginner but: Go into the Bios do a clean install, advanced systems delete so you have one full partion. Delegate one partion a certain number of GB to windows 7say on a 1 TB system 500 GB to this and a certain number of GB to vistasay 500 GB to this. Install vista in one partion and windows 7 in the other. When you boot. you'll get a black screen asking which partion you want to boot. Choose either windows 7 or vista?

Does this make any sense?

Sorry for the late reply, very busy at work ><

I have reformatted my C: and created two partitions. One is for vista which I already have installed and the other is unallocated space if I remembered correctly. I boot into Vista fine at the moment. Not at home now so I will post Disk Management screenshot in few hours. Too scared to install W7 atm ...

Oh btw, I am thinking of getting an SSD solely for loading the OS. However, most SSDs are around 50GB or so. My question is, can I install the OS on the SSD and somehow make it install programs to other drives?

For example if the SSD is C:\ and I have a 1TB HDD as D:\... I install windows in C: but the program files goes to D:\Program Files. If this is possible how would it work with multiple OSes?

Thanks.

I had this problem I had Vista on one drive and W7 on another I iahd to restore 7 and it lost the Boot manager during restore I just put in the W-7 disc and did a repair had to do it twice and it restored the boot manager. I now have Vista Boot Pro installed so I can do repair in the future if need. I have it installed on W7 and Vista.

Originally Posted by Super Sarge

I had this problem I had Vista on one drive and W7 on another I iahd to restore 7 and it lost the Boot manager during restore I just put in the W-7 disc and did a repair had to do it twice and it restored the boot manager. I now have Vista Boot Pro installed so I can do repair in the future if need. I have it installed on W7 and Vista.

Yeah somehow W7 and Vista doesn't like to co-exist. I have installed them both on the same HD though, but different partition.

I lost the MBR for Vista once W7 is installed hence I can only boot into W7. The diskmanagement shows all the partitions but the one with Vista in it doesn't have the label "boot" which I reckon makes the partition bootable. Only workaround for me so far is to use EasyBCD to restore Vista's MBR but that means I can't boot into W7 after reboot...