Windows 7 and 8 dual boot and storage options

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bsoa

bsoa

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Nov 10, 2011
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I have a Lenovo y500 with Windows 8 installed on its stock 1TB hard drive. I am getting an 128gb mSATA drive later this week and plan to install windows 7 on it and use it as my primary OS.

My plan:
1. Restore the laptop to factory settings (Windows 8 installed on the 1TB drive)
2. Disconnect the 1TB drive and attach the new mSATA SSD only.
3. Install Windows 7 on the mSATA SSD.
4. Reconnect original 1TB drive with windows 8 and then use BIOS boot menu to choose which disk to boot from. (new SSD for Win 7 old 1TB drive for Win8)

This seems to be the easiest way to set up dual booting without messing around with the MBR. I dont mind switching boot drives in the BIOS when I need to.

My question is: With this setup, can I create a separate partition on the original 1 TB drive and use it for storage / program installations for both Windows 7 and Windows 8?

It would look like this:
128gb SSD = Win 7 boot drive
1TB HDD = 128gb Win 8 partition, ~800gb partition with separate folders for Windows 7 and Windows 8 programs and general storage.
 
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bsoa

bsoa

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Nov 10, 2011
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So I would:
1. Restore the laptop to factory settings (Windows 8 installed on the 1TB drive)
2. Create storage partition on 1TB drive.
3. Disconnect the 1TB drive and attach the new mSATA SSD only.
4. Install Windows 7 on the mSATA SSD.
5. Reconnect original 1TB drive with windows 8 and then use BIOS boot menu to choose which disk to boot from. (new SSD for Win 7 old 1TB drive for Win8)

Will it cause problems if I install programs in Windows 7 and use the new partition on the 1TB drive instead of the SSD?
 
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bsoa

bsoa

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I tried this and everything seems to be working well. I did lose access to Linux Mint which I had installed on its own partition on the 1TB drive. Not sure what happened, but the GRUB launcher doesnt show up now if I set the BIOS to legacy support and boot from the 1TB drive (how it used to work). Not a huge concern though, was planning on trying to run linux in a virtual box anyway.

Otherwise having Windows 7 on the SSD and 8 on the HDD seems to work just fine as long as they are installed separately. I just manually set the BIOS to legacy support or UEFI depending on which OS I want. Doesnt seem to be any problem using a shared storage partition for both either.
 
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ftball

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Windows think themselves better that Linux, so they always remove all traces of GRUB. I suggest you boot into Linux using Live USB or similar and install GRUB and use it to manage booting. Will save you trouble of going to BIOS everytime you want to switch.
P.S. I have similar setup. 1TB hdd for storage and 128GB ssd for Windows and Ubuntu.
 
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bsoa

bsoa

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Ya. I did a system restore with Lenovos One Key Recovery (no windows 8 disk or recovery disk for a clean install! :fou: ). I'm assuming this is what broke GRUB, even though the linux partition is still there.


May try to fix it, but not a big deal. Installed it just to check it out and mess around in the first place. My SLI doesnt seem to work in linux anyway.
 
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ftball

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We have Mac for that - *nix system with graphics support.
If you ever need to do something not graphics related I suggest go straight Linux. In my old pc same application ran at least 10% faster than on Windows.
 
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