Windows 7 and Windows 8 Dual-Boot problem!

chrisjuchniewicz

Honorable
Jun 30, 2012
19
0
10,510
Hello, I'm having trouble booting into Windows 7 after installing Windows 8 to a second hard drive.
It's not two partitions. It's two hard drives. One has Windows 7, and the other has Windows 8.
Windows 8 is booting up just fine, but every time I try to boot into Windows 7, it just goes to the startup repair crap. It says it can't find the problem.

I know Windows 8 has a new boot loader or something like that. Is it possible that Windows 7 isn't compatible with the new boot loader?
If anybody could help me fix this, I'd be very great full.



Thanks, Chris
 

John_VanKirk

Distinguished
Hi Chris,

I'm assuming you have two completely installations on separate HDD's, both with an MSR reserved partition, and both marked as "Active"? Of did you end up with a single MSR on one of the drives and not the other? Then you change the boot order with a hot key like F12 to the desired Win OS?

There is a difference in the boot blocks where the MSR on Win-8 takes 350MB as compared to 100MB for Win-7.

You might try placing the Win-8 drive on SATA_0, and the Win-7 on a higher number SATA_#, to see if that works.

They should be completely separate with their own boot blocks, so that if you unplugged the power to Win-8, Win-7 would boot properly even if not set first to boot.

 

Alfheim

Honorable
Oct 7, 2012
38
0
10,540
boot loader no longer exists in windows vista above OS. You could try using your win 7 installer CD boot from there and use startup repair. I'd say it has something to do with the bootmgr not recognizing Win 7 or a missing startup file.
 

TRENDING THREADS