I have 3 hard drives 1TB windows 8.1 another 1TB windows 7 Ultimate and a 3rd drive windows 8 pro how do I set up a system b

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mcdave

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When I try to boot to one drive and the others are disconnected it boots fine. If they are all connected the computer sees them but if I select windows 7 after running windows 8 it says I need to repair drive and goes into a constant reboot sequence never booting to selected drive. Appreciate any help on this as I just change mother board to Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 and Amd 6 core processor with 8GB of ram.
Thanks
 
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mcdave

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COLGeek,
They are 3 separate drives all had a different OS, so they probably each have its own boot sector. Is there a way to set this up going thru the boot menu or will the system always look for what OS was running last?
Thanks
 
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mcdave

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Yes my windows 7 OS has most of my large apps and that's the drive that does not boot gets caught up in a reboot cycle. Used to be able to just plug the drive I wanted to use in and boot to it. Since MB and AMD 6 core installed it has not booted the same.
 
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COLGeek

COLGeek

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You should be able to execute installs of the other OSes from Win7 and then install Win 8 and 8.1 to their own partitions. Doing this will configure the boot manager to be aware of all instances of Windows. Sounds to me that you installed all separately as if stand-alone installations.

The simple fix would be to reinstall Win 8 and 8.1 while in Win 7.
 
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mcdave

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mcdave

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They are stand alone installations that I have on one computer now. Is there a way to leave all 3 drives hooked up and boot to the one I want on boot up without any conflict between OS ? Does each OS write to a boot sequence when it is opened? Why doesn't it look at the OS you want to start?
Thank you COLGeek for all the info on what I want to do. Just want to know if it is possible.
Thanks
 
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COLGeek

COLGeek

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If set up properly, the Windows boot manager can see all 3 installations you have and let you select a default OS. Because you installed them all independently, the 3 boot managers are unaware of the other installations.

Of course, you can manually select your boot device via your BIOS (like by pressing F12 at the BIOS post, on many systems, to select the device to boot from).

You might be able to install a 3rd party boot manager to get around all of this (like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GRUB ). Really a matter of how complex you want to make the process.
 
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mcdave

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mcdave

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Thank you for the fast response. I don't want to make this anymore complex than it has to be and I was using the bios boot before. It saw 2 drives ok but when 3 drives were connected it saw them but trying to boot to windows 7 it seemed to want to go through a chk disk scan and wanted to repair the drive? Again I appreciate the help and will try this again. Might be offline if I get the blue screen of death.
 
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COLGeek

COLGeek

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I am going to guess that the issue you are seeing is because Windows is allocating virtual memory on the other drives and the shutdown process is complicated by the fact the that the OSes are not aware of each other.

Check your virtual memory settings (Control Panel, System, Advanced System Settings, Performance settings) and make sure that virtual memory is only allocated to the disk that contains the OS you are using at that time. In your case, you will need to check this on all 3 installs.
 
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naushadz

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I have same issue and C drive contains the boot sector for all.
 
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