Can I have both a GPT and MBR formatted drives on a dual boot system?
I would like to retain my Win 7 installation as is with MBR formatted hard drive, and after the Win 8.1 to Win 10 upgrade, do a clean Win 10 install with GPT (UEFI) format.
I've been reading that having fast startup on in windows 8/10 can cause issues with dual booting systems with other operating systems installed like windows 7. I have windows 7 on one ssd and going to have windows 10 on a second. Will i have to disable fast startup in windows 10 or any other type of hibernation settings.
View 1 RepliesI want to dual boot windows 7 and windows 10 on 2 separate hard drives.
View 9 RepliesI have 2 Windows 10 (7 Upgrades) Installed,
...I would like to set them up, so I can Dual Boot them, without re-installing them.
In my desktop I have two hard disks ( disk 0 and disk 1 ) . Disk 1 is a clone of disk 0 created by Macrium Reflect
Disk 0 : ( C: ) windows 10 pro , upgrade from windows 7 , ( E: ) windows 8.1 pro , ( G: ) Storage partition
Disk 1 : clone of disk 0
problem description : I see in msconfig / boot a wrong listing
windows 10 ( C:WINDOWS) : Current OS ; Default OS
windows 8.1 pro ( H:WINDOWS ) instead of ( E:WINDOWS )
Nevertheless the dual booting works fine as well as the shift between the disks via BIOS.
The question is , could I fix the situation using the EasyBCD of Neosmart Technologies to edit the bootloader ?
I see can change drive letter H: to E: and save the change , am I right or wrong ? or any other way ....
My laptop has dual boot - Windows 7 and Windows 10. My Win7 environment is my main working environment with lots of programs installed and important files. I installed the Win10 environment just to play around with 10 during the technical preview. Now, I would like to disable the 10 environment and upgrade the 7 to 10. Am I able to do this, or have I already "used up" my one upgrade on this computer's Windows license?
I notice that in Windows 7 I have not received the icon in the notification area that invites me to upgrade to 10. This makes me think I might have used up my chance to upgrade.
My end goal is to have a single Windows 10 environment. Note that the reason I want to upgrade my 7 environment to 10 is because I don't want to have to re-install all of my programs and files into the current 10 environment.
After several weeks of testing I'm ready to go full on Windows 10 and want to get rid of Windows 7 but I have some partitioning issues I want to clean up. I currently have Windows 7 on drive 0 (360 GB) and Windows 10 on drive 1 (500 GB). Both are SATA drives and RAID is enabled in the bios but not active.
What I think I'd like to do is simply swap the drives physically so that Drive 0 has my current Windows 10 install on it and make it primary boot active etc. The drive with Windows 7 on it would become drive 1 and I would delete the Windows 7 partition and re-partition it with a clean empty partition just for extra space.
Second question, any advantage to using this drive configuration in a RAID setup?
I have win10 64 installed on my SSD and win10 32 bit on a HD. The SSD is GPT partitioned and the HD MBR. I can boot from the Windows boot loader in the BIOS into 64 bit windows on the SSD and, by selecting the appropriate HD in the BIOS into the 32 bit windows in the HD. I cannot figure out how to get that boot menu (either gui of text based) that I have read about in the forums. Do I need to convert the HD to GPT as well. Do I need to change anything to get this to work?
View 9 RepliesI have Windows 10 and 8.1 dual booted but I’m having trouble removing 8.1. 10 is on a Seagate 2TB HDD, and 10 is on a Samsung 2TB HDD. Both are SATA and my motherboard is BIOS. As long as the Samsung (8.1) is drive 0 and is boot’s first choice, all is well. I get the option to select either OS, and either one can be made default.
In attempting to remove 8.1 I have tried several things like making the Seagate drive O, removing power from the Samsung, swapping boot choice, but always fail and I continually get, “an operating system wasn’t found” no matter the disk or boot sequence, except the one above.
Included are jpg’s of disk management while in Windows 10, both disk and volume views. How to decouple 8.1?
I attempted to set up a dual boot configuration using my existing Win 7 Pro on a Samsung SSD drive, and a clean install of Win 10 Pro on a fresh Kingston SSD drive. I created bootable Windows 10 installation USB, reset the UEFI Bios boot order and proceeded with the install. Win 10 installed, however it would not recognize the Win 7 Pro drive. I checked the UEFI Bios again, and the Samsung SSD was no longer shown in the "Fixed Boot Order Priorities". However, it was listed under "Hard Drive BBS Priorities", and under "Boot Override". It also shows up in Win 7 in the drives listings.
My motherboard is a MSI Z97 Gaming 5, with Click Bios 4 v1.9.
I must also mention, my Samsung SSD with Win 7 Pro was set up not with UEFI but Legacy boot. This was my first mobo with UEFI, so I made that mistake due to my ignorance.
I reformatted the Kingston Win 10 drive. Rebooted, but got error message that boot device not found. I rebooted and hit F11 to get back into Bios. A popup box gave me a listing of bootable devices and the Samsung SSD appeared. Selected it and it booted into Win 7 no problem. I went back into the Bios, but the Samsung SSD still not listed. I shut down the system, unplugged the Kingston SSD, rebooted, went back into Bios, and the Samsung returned.
I then shut down the system, connected the Kingston into a different SATA port, rebooted the system, went back to Bios, and the Kingston remains unlisted in the "Fixed Boot Order Priorities" as before, but shows up in "Hard Drive BBS Priorities", and under "Boot Override". It also shows up in Win 7 in the drives listings. Remember that the Kingston is just formatted, no op system installed on it.
I set up the Win 10 install on the Kingston SSD as a legacy drive too. Another question I will ask is can you have one operating system on a legacy drive and one on a UEFI drive in the same PC?
I have Win 10 as the second of a dual boot with Vista. Each is on it's own hard drive. If I remove the Vista drive then win 10 won't boot as it is looking for winload.exe. Is there a way I can give it access to the winload.exe it is looking forand then uninstall Vista? If this cannot be done it isn't a big problem weaving Vista active, I just don't need it anymore.
View 1 RepliesI was running win 7 (64bit) pleasantly but decided to install Win10, did all the needed stuff for getting dual boot setup.Win10 booted fine, when selected from dual boot menu, but I have many issues on win10, Lenovo laptop is begging for mercy on win10 for many things, my android phone gets disconnected every few seconds if I use youtube, laptop becomes sluggish. USB3 will not install, which worked in win7 earlier.
Fed up with win10, even after disabling driver signature, making sure every driver is correct which I am installing, but this laptop hates win 10 as of now.Now if I choose to run win7, lappy reboots and thats a LOOP. my win7 installation is shown in Drive letter E: while windows 10 is shown in C: What would be the safest way of Re-installating win 7 on E: without loosing the following the crappy win 10 of c:/ dual mode option on win 7 +10
What I want is to run win7 setup which has SP1 integrated and still be able to boot in win10 if I needed later.I have activation keys for both provided by my office which is based on volume licensing.
I have a PC with win 10 x64 installed. It is a new PC with UEFI firmware and secure boot enabled, though I can disabled it very easily.
I want to installed Win 7 x86 (32bit) on a second hard drive and have it dual-boot config with the current Win 10. I know I have to disable secure boot for installing 32 bit, but Im concerned about the process of installing Win 7 AFTER the already installed Win 10.
How can I go about doing this without losing access to my Win 10? I need to install win 7 for compatibility reasons.
I am dual booting with Win7. I have not used 7 in a few months. I want to know if there is a way to delete and merge the partition that Win7 is on. Also I want to know how to get rid of the dual boot screen and just go with the reg Win10 boot screen.
View 5 RepliesI have a Acer Aspire XC-603G desktop upgraded to Windows 10 64bit Home (no Hyper-V). I want to run 16 bit software that is incompatible. I would like to dual boot with Vista x86 (gave away my XP). From what I understand, you must load the older version first due to Windows 10's MBR. Can I backup/clone Windows 10 partition, reformat and repartition the HDD, install Vista in first partition, then restore Windows 10 to the second partition? I'm thinking I'll need a fresh Windows 10 install. Or is there a simpler way? The only other way I see is to buy the Pro upgrade to get Hyper-V. And if I did the latter would it really be compatible with my Windows 95 16bit ImageReader Scanner software?
View 2 RepliesI recently (clean) installed Windows 10 on a new SSD. Windows 7 resides on my first drive.
1) I first set the USB to boot from;
2) Began to install Windows 10;
3) First snare: upon first reboot, after removing the USB, the system just started my old Windows 7 (!). (I expected a dual boot menu there.)
4) Rebooted, set SSD to first disk, and finished installing Windows 10;
5); Tried to add boot menu later (both in Windows 7 and Windows 10), using the Advanced System Settings, to no avail: neither OS sees another boot partition.
I have a dual boot 7 and 8.1, which are on separate drives. I'd like to keep 7 and install 10 over 8.1, I have downloaded 10 on usb. My question is do I have to disconnect the windows 7 drive before I try to install 10?.
View 1 RepliesI have the Windows 10 Pro ISO with a Windows 10 key. (from MSDN)
I want to install Windows 10 as dual boot with Windows 8.1. Both are x64.
Is it possible to install Windows 10 from the ISO? I know you can upgrade that way. But I want to do a clean install AND install alongside Windows 8.1.
Windows 10 currently installedUEFI (Legacy/BIOS is supported but I do not prefer using it as it may cause more problems in the future)1 Hard Disk Drive
Goals: Install Windows 7 on another partitionMaintain my current Windows 10 installationNOT have to switch to Legacy/BIOS mode
I found this: Windows 10 - Dual Boot with Windows 7 or Windows 8 But it assumes a Windows 7 installation and subsequently dual booting Windows 10 on it. What I would like is essentially the opposite.
I had been dual-booting between win 7 and win 10. That part was working fine, but I was unhappy wth my win 10 installation. So I erased the partition and reinstalled it. First sign of trouble: It didn't detect my win 7 installation. But it was there (I already got files from it). I installed EasyBCD, added the entry for win 7, saved the set up, then wrote the MBR with the new entry. Went to MSConfig to doublecheck. Both entries were there. I restarted, and it booted straight into Win 10. EasyBCD no longer had the win 7 entry. Neither did MSConfig. Went through the whole process again. Same problem at restart. And it wasn't fastboot, I could see the BIOS entry, etc.
View 9 RepliesI have two systems.System 1 is a desktop running W7 Premium SP1. I did clean install of W10 from iso on separate partition. W10 will not activate using W7 numbers. I suspect that is because I moved W7 to an SSD 6 mos. ago and W10 expects the old HDD. BTW, installed W10 to partition on the SSD
System 2 is dual boot laptop (Dell Inspiron) with W7 SP1 and W8.1. I want to keep W7, and I could try W10 install either by upgrading 8.1 or clean install to the 8.1 partition. Reccomendations? I don't want to risk losing the W7. I do have disk image backups of both W7 and W8.1.
Having run the Insider program for several months I decided to use my Windows 7 Pro disk to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro by creating a new partition and installing and upgrading there. The PC has happily dual-booted for a month or so from Volume2 (Insider on the original System Reserved and C: partitions) and Volume3 (Windows 10 Pro on I:). I've been gradually building up Volume3 with all my programs ready to transfer permanently, but as I was running out of room I used MiniTool Partition Wizard (from Volume2) to reduce the size of Volume2 and increase the size of Volume3. I realize now that was a daft thing to do, as the PC will no longer boot from Volume3! Is there a relatively simple way of making Volume3 bootable again? If too much is involved I may decide simply to run Insider for ever.
Update - I should have added that I've tried repairing it using the Windows 10 disk with which I installed it, and it simply says that it's not repairable.
Have my new Win 10 Pro system up and running...so far so good....except for networking ? However...I forgot to keep track of my passwords/acct records...etc for a number of programs on Win 7 that I am putting back onto Win 10...passwords...registrations keys...etc
Can I restore a full Acronis tib of Win 7 Pro and do a dual boot setup with the new 10....and how ?
I know it's not kosher to have both Win 10 new and the older Win 7 on the same PC because of the clean upgrade to Win 10...but I need it a short period to get into Win 7 to recover/find my passwords and registration info for a number of Win 7 installed programs to activate on Win 10
How do I go about setting up a dual boot 'temporarily' to recover needed information for my new Win 10 Pro install?
Currently, I have dual boot Win7 and Win10. And the only reason I have Win7 is because the drivers for a printer were not updated to Win10. Now recently HP did just that, and I no longer need Win7.
The way I have it set up is that I have Win7 on one partition, Win10 on another (100GB each) and the rest is Storage. Is it safe to simply remove and format the partition that has Win7 on it ?
What I have HDD Win 7 Home Premium Activated SSD Win 10 (Upgraded Win 7) Activated Dont have a Boot Manager Can choose Boot up Disk from BIOS at startup If I choose Win 10 - All Boots Well, No problem When I choose Win 7 after using Win 10 Chkdsk runs and deletes thousands of Files Finishes chkdsk and Boots Win 7 fine Win 7 Boot after Win 7 Boot - no chkdsk and Boots fine I think it might be making changes to make it the C Drive - but thats without knowledge both Win 10 and Win 7 use C drive When installing Win 7 before the Upgrade, I installed to "unalocated" space which I read would give it a C Drive as alternative to Creating into a Drive Letter eg G Drive I could live with it as it is, if it were not for the Long Startup deleting etc to Win 7 - sooner or later the deleting would malfunction I am at a standstill and dont want to tinker and screw everything up...
View 5 Replieshow to be able to install both Linux and Windows 10 on my laptop's hard drive?So that when I restart my laptop I will be able to choose from either Windows 10 or Linux?
I did that once with Windows 7, and I remember I had 2 possibilities: Either to be able to choose through a Linux prompt at the startup, or through a Windows prompt. I tried both options. (It was either doing it via a Microsoft boot manager or via Linux boot manager or something like that, I just can't remember)
Edit: I remember there was some sort of Linux boot manager if you install Linux AFTER Windows, and if you then delete Linux completely, you had to repair Windows boot loader (Or it was the other way?i.e installing Windows AFTER Linux and then repairing Windows boot loader?)