After installing 8.1, cant dual boot between windows 7 and 8.1

Derrainga

Honorable
Mar 9, 2014
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10,510
So i originally had windows 7 on my computer and had a windows 8.1 disk laying around for a while and wanted to have a dual boot setup. So I partioned my SSD for about 40GB for Windows 8.1, and then after it installed, It did not allow my to choose my OS, and booted right into 8.1, and even though the data is still there, the system does not recognize it.

Is there any way to bring back the choice to boot into 8.1 or 7 without wiping my drive of all data and starting from scratch?
 
You would need to install a boot manager as 7 and 8.1 use different boot partitions in most cases. The system (BIOS) is likely seeing the GPU partition created when you installed windows 8.1 and it superceded the old boot partition which may not even still exist. Dual boot systems need to be configured correctly PRIOR to installation of the second OS.
 
I don't understand the data in that article. Every system I see where somebody installs 8 or 8.1 with a GPT boot partition, 7 is not accessible unless a separate dual boot manager has been installed to keep the mbr from 7 intact. Am I missing something here? Are you sure that article wasn't created prior to windows 8?