Dual boot with Windows 7 on SSHD fails

Ghitorni

Commendable
Apr 22, 2016
4
0
1,510
Till date I always had Windows 7 in 32 & 64 bit flavors and occasionally also xp.

Recently I got a 1 tb SSHD and installed win 7 64 bit. However, the 2nd install of the same flavor was awkward (in the first install, after expanding files windows rebooted) because it completed all tasks before rebooting.

However, when I tried booting from the newer install, I saw the dreaded message "cannot load winload.exe"

I deleted that install and tried with 32 bit, same result.

Tried Xp too, same result.

I even deleted all installs and had 32 bit first, then 64 bit, same result.

Currently I am using the 32 bit and typing from there.

Is this how SSHD supposed to behave? I thought the 7gb cache would speed up things, but never expected this.

What may be wrong, any idea? Thanks in advance for any inputs
 
Solution
When you are doing a setup with multiple versions of Windows, start by installing the oldest one and then install the newer ones or it can cause an OS to fail to load. Windows 7 uses a completely different boot loader than XP.

There is no reason why you would need to run 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 on the same machine. I cannot think of a situation at all where this would be useful at all. Windows 7 64 bit can run any program Windows 7 32-bit can.

I would delete all installs and partitions, then install XP and then afterwards install Windows 7 64-bit on a separate partition.

Or even better, install just 64-bit Windows 7 and run Windows XP in a virtual machine using VirtualBox. Windows XP is not recommended as a main OS anymore as...

jr9

Estimable
When you are doing a setup with multiple versions of Windows, start by installing the oldest one and then install the newer ones or it can cause an OS to fail to load. Windows 7 uses a completely different boot loader than XP.

There is no reason why you would need to run 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 on the same machine. I cannot think of a situation at all where this would be useful at all. Windows 7 64 bit can run any program Windows 7 32-bit can.

I would delete all installs and partitions, then install XP and then afterwards install Windows 7 64-bit on a separate partition.

Or even better, install just 64-bit Windows 7 and run Windows XP in a virtual machine using VirtualBox. Windows XP is not recommended as a main OS anymore as it has no security updates or support. Dual booting isn't really ideal in 2018 especially with a 15 year old OS.

Nothing is wrong with the SSHD.
 
Solution