Installation :: Windows Boot And Windows On Different Drives
Feb 10, 2016
Before installing Windows 10 I clean reinstalled my Windows 7 onto a new SSD but inadvertently left my BIOS boot drive as my old HDD. Now I find that I have my windows 10 boot files in the HDD and the rest of the OS on the SSD, so I am still dependant on that old HDD. It's quite old, and I tried to swap it out to a new HDD but found this issue.
I've tried BootRec /RebuildBcd, BootRec /FixMbr and BootRec /FixBoot, rebooting the PC between each, but without success. I want to make the SSD bootable, what have I missed?
I have 2 SSDs and a few mechanical HDDs. I was dual booting (with Win 7 and 10) by changing the bios boot order for a while but have now decided to stick with Windows 10. By default Windows 10 loads. However I used to have Windows 7 as my boot drive. I want to now format the older SSD that Windows 7 is on and use it as a backup drive. Before I format my old Windows 7 drive I want to check that 10 will load okay. In the past years I have removed drives and found my OS no longer boots, so I don't want to make that mistake this time. I need to make sure my boot is coming from the 10 drive. So I have done a screen grab for you to see. Do I need to make the actual 10 partition active, or is just having the 500mb reserved partition as active ok ? The windows 10 drive is listed as such (C) and the Windows 7 drive is titled "Ready to Format" (H).
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.
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.
Whenever I try to install a 64 bit Windows 10 copy from a flash drive, I get stuck on the 4 blue squares, with no white dots spinning. Then after about 10 seconds the PC restarts. I have tried the official way with the media creation tool, I have tried just downloading the ISO and using a third party bootable USB maker, I have tried ISO's from pirate sites (yes, I know, not the best solution) but none of those worked. Every time I tried a different method I always fully formatted the USB drive. Oddly enough the 32 bit version worked once or twice but even that doesn't work anymore. My PC specs are quite good so I really don't know what's the issue. Btw im running a 120 GB AData SSD and a 1 TB Seagate hard drive.
Upon starting windows (10) I'm constantly being shown the boot manager and the only OS I can choose from is windows 7. I am using W10 having upgraded from W7. Windows still boots but the startup times vary from 15sec to around 3min.
Here is a screenshot of my boot tab in msconfig and a screenshot of mt disc management screen.
how 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?)
So I've finally managed to install Windows 10 Pro x64 although with Windows 7 left over in dual boot. It created a "Windows.old" folder in the C: drive and Windows 7 doesn't boot anymore. How do I uninstall Windows 7 from my PC and will it affect any files?
I am dual booting Windows 10 and Windows 8.1. Each operating system is on a separate physical solid state drive. My default is Windows 10. The Windows 10 OS was installed on the drive that originally contained Windows 7 when I dual booted Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. I don't have drive partitions to deal with as each operating system is on a separate physical drive.
Now I would like to remove the dual boot by removing Windows 8.1, leaving just Windows 10. That will leave me with an unused SDD.
When I am in Windows 10, the default OS, the msconfig Boot section shows Windows 10 as the default, as it should. To remove the dual boot, can I just Delete Windows 8.1 from the Boot section of msconfig and make the setting permanent?
I was working with my computer the other day and it rebooted spontaneously. When it did I got a "Preparing Windows" or "Configuring Windows" message after I logged in and when if finished I was back at the very first Windows set up. None of my start menu adjustments were there, none of my mouse, wallpaper, etc. settings were in place, and worst of all I lost all my settings for my Firefox and Thunderbird applications which meant all of my mail history, address book, etc. btw, I wasn't connected to the internet at the time, my connection was down.
I get a message saying it can't? find a profile so it is creating a temp one which will be deleted on shutdown.
I should point out that my files are still there, except for Appdata/Roaming and I do have a back up of my data so if I can stop this reset behavior I can recover data.
Now it reconfigures at every reboot. Even after reestablishing my internet connection.
I just got my new MSI GE62 2QD that came installed with windows 10. Now I'm new-ish to computer systems but I used to have a dual boot of Windows 7 & Ubuntu using basic bios. Now I am lost with the new UEFI.
Here's my question: With my new pc using UEFI, how would I go about dual booting Windows 10 & Fedora 22 Without using grub. I wish to keep the default Windows boot loader.
When I try to install windows it says "Windows could not prepare the computer to boot into the next phase of installation. To install windows, restart the installation" and i restarted like 10 times but its still not working ...
OK, I have Windows 7 OEM Version and want to upgrade to Windows 10 After I get Windows 10 Activated through the upgrade can I...
Clean install Windows 7 (with Original 7 key) and clean install Windows 10 (should automatically activate) to have a dual boot? Or is Microsoft going to block my activation saying you can't have both 7 and 10?
I have a different computer that has a OEM-Builders edition of Windows 7. I don't want Windows 10 on it right now as the software I need to run will not run on it but...
I want to upgrade to Windows 10 just to get the free upgrade and activate then revert back to Windows 7.
Later on down the road a year or so can I install Windows 10 with no problems activating it?
Okay, so the other week i received a new Clevo P650SE laptop. The laptop only had a 500GB 7200RPM HDD with Windows 10 to begin with, so yesterday i added my Samsung 840 EVO SSD. As i wanted this to now be the primary drive, i made another new installation of Windows onto here. After doing this, the system now displayed a boot selection at startup with the choice between the new Windows 10 installation on my SSD or the old one on the HDD.
As i no longer wanted to use the HDD for running Windows, i decided it would be best to delete Windows from this drive. So i booted onto an Ubuntu USB and wiped the entire drive of it's data in GParted, which included three different partitions. This seemed perfectly fine to me at the time, because i had a the new installation from the SSD showing up in the boot manager.
However, when i rebooted the machine and attempted to boot into the new installation on the SSD, it gives me this message:
"The boot configuration data from your PC is missing or contains errors. File: /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/BC Error code: 0xc000000f"
I have tried everything to recover the system but nothing has worked. Startup repair from my Windows USB doesn't do anything, the system reset wouldn't operate because it stated that the partition was locked.
Nothing with the Command Prompt is working, I have done 'bootrec /fixmbr', 'bootrec /fixboot' and 'bootrec /rebuildbcd', but the last command returns the following error:
"The requested system drive cannot be found."
I also did 'bcdboot C:/Windows' but that also refused to work. I assumed the reason for this might be because the drive didn't have a letter, but when i attempted to add a letter is says:
"The specified drive letter is not free to be assigned."
Both drives in my laptop have now been completely wiped and converted to MBR, but even with the two drives empty the original message still appears when booting my Windows USB in UEFI.
I have only had this laptop a couple of weeks and it's already completely messed up. I can boot the Windows USB in Legacy and install Windows as normal, but of course i'm looking to have it back on UEFI as it was before.
I've just bought a little Gigabyte Brix 1900, but when installing Windows 10 I got an error saying:
"Windows could not update the computer's boot configuration. Installation cannot proceed"
It turns out that the unit needs a BIOS update to the latest version before Windows 10 can be installed. I just wanted to post this information here, as I imagine this will be a frustration to many others!
With a few workarounds, you can update the BIOS from within the Repair > Tools > Command Prompt options. Just be sure to download the DOS BIOS zip from the gigabyte website (which won't run properly, but contains the ROM), plus the Windows BIOS tool which you can then run from the command prompt.
I recently have noticed that windows 7 and I just upgraded to windows 10 via the free upgrade, will not show all my hard drives ? On start up they show for a few seconds then go away. Both are WD. One is 500 gb, and the other is a new 1TB. I am not sure when this started but noticed it just recently when I tried to access my pictures on the 500gb drive. I have tried just about everything here with no luck. The 500gb drive does have a windows vista OS on it but the 1 TB is just for back ups etc. All was fine some time ago but now, all I see is my SSD with my OS and an external drive. Also the Hard Drives do show up in Bios. I might have found a reason this happens. Most likely on a windows and / or driver update. On my system the drivers for these missing Hard Drives you can see them in device manager by selecting view / show hidden devices.
After several hours on my pc i open a windows explorer window and this comes up;
Now if i open up a new explorer window on top of that this comes up;
If you notice the icons are gone, if i close both windows and open a new one it starts over from the top.
Other issue is if i click on properties on files like images no property window comes up, i bet there is more but this just happen an hour ago. Everything works apart from that, bluetooth headset, games, videos, browsers, email etc. and... windows search doesnt work, doesnt turn out any results even if i search for something like notepad
I currently have Windows 7 installed on a 128 GB SSD (C drive), which also houses my more "essential" programs and the Users folder.
I also have a 1 TB HD (E drive) which I installed the rest of my programs on (though, the registry still remains on C) and also contains most of my personal data. I moved the My Documents, My Music, etc. from C to E.
If I decide to upgrade to Windows 10, will the installer detect that I also have programs on my E drive? Or does it only look at the primary drive, my C drive?
This morning I tried to login to my windows machine, windows 10 pro, intel i5 3.30ghz, 12gb RAM, 2TB HD. and kept telling me password was incorrect. I then removed windows password thru other admin user, and now all external hd's except for c: drive all lecked by bitlocker. Never installed or activated it.
I have 2 internal sata drives and 2 usb drives locked. I have gone to control panel, bitlocker, and tried to unlock drives, tried to do a search for key id on pc and nothing is found. My raw files are in the backup drives.
I have attempted to download windows 10 around 4/5 times, the download completes and states that my computer needs to restart upon which it claims it is configuring the windows 10 upgrade. I would assume from this point it would restart into the windows 10 configuration however each time I have tried it it restarts back into windows 8 as if nothing had happened.
My laptop then opens up windows update and says I am able to download windows 10. This is really frustrating as I can't even seem to get into the windows 10 setup.
As you can see I am attempting to download again but there is no trace at all of it attempting to install windows other than this failed update that you can see here.
plugged in USB thumb drive opened windows explorer right clicked drive scan with windows defender and it said scanning pc but it never shows any options so I dont know if it scanned pc or usb for sure why or not
My Windows' acting up, tried every trick in the book to fix it and no dice, so I'm taking the easy yet bothersome route of reinstalling everything. Again.
But Windows 10 has a "Reset this PC" option under Settings > Update & Security > Recovery (screen cap for clarity) which in practical effects, it's what I need, but faster and less bothersome.
Problem is, I have more than one (physical) hard drive on my system, and I don't know if Windows will restrain itself to formatting the system drive or if it'll format all drives present.
And I'd rather ask a relatively dumb question than risk losing all my backed up data XP.
Windows Search returning no results on one of my external harddrives. I have already:
Tried indexing the HDD and rebuilding.Non-indexing and rebuilding.Indexing only specific folders on the HDD and rebuilding.Specifically disabling indexing for this drive in the drive's properties.Checked that I have the appropriate permissions on the drive (they are identical to my other HDDs).
Crude example of my problem:
I am looking for the following file, A:Example est.txt.I am inside the A:Example folder.I search for "test", "*" or "txt".It says there are no results.
And it says "no results" instantly - it doesn't appear to even try.
I do not have a second drive with sufficient space to move the contents to do a format - so I'm looking for non-destructive solutions.
My computer is trying to install Update to Windows 10 Home, version 1511, 10586, but can't. It claims there is no system reserved partition, but there is. This computer was upgraded from Windows 7 to 10, and immediately after doing that I installed a Samsung SSD and migrated the system to it using the software that came with the SSD. The migration went well and I've been using Windows 10 for months.
All of a sudden, when trying to do some updates it claims it cannot update the system reserved partition. The partition is there, it's 100MB in size. So I tried booting from the install CD, which I burned to do the upgrade (so I know it's a good disc). My computer recognizes there's a disc in the DVD drive, but no matter how I set the bios boot order it will not boot from the DVD, so I can't do a repair on the SSD.
