Windows 8+7 Dual Boot Incompatibility

NewsMeQuick

Hi guys,

I've been doing the above ^^ for some time now. I've been using W8.1 as the main OS for my notebook. Yesterday I rebooted into Win7 to poke around. Every time that it said 'Starting Windows' it bluescreen (very rapidly) and restarted.

I tried the disc auto-repair, and this cut the bridge to W8.1 of course. When I tried Win7 it then said that there was another problem. The logon screen appeared, as if in safe mode, then produced numerous errors about being untable to log on or start logon services. I could not resolve this.

I eventually decided to try the manufacturer inbuilt restore of Win7 while leaving data alone. This seemed fine until it says 'preparing Windows for first use', then it said that the installation was interrupted (not by me or power use). I tried this several times but no use.

Shortened, I could not get back into Win8, I tried all the repairs, though it should only have been a bootloader issue, right? The Win8 bootloader will look back and see Win 7 and offer both. I formatted that partition, reinstalled Win8 on that partition, removed all data from the Win7 drive and then tried a complete reinstallation of the entire hard disk with the manufacturer restore disks. This worked.

I would like to poke around with W8.2 when it comes in the Spring. I need to understand what happened. My top two guesses are:

1. Minitool Partition manager, I suspected that program of being ... ruthless in hard drive partitioning and resizing in the past.
2. Perhaps some incompatibility coming from Win8?

Any ideas? I would be very grateful if anyone has any ideas. :rolleyes:

Fysh

You need the Win8 bootloader to be in control, but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to dual-boot both - I've got a similar setup on my desktop, and I've even managed to incorporate a VMWare install on a separate disk as well. I use EasyBCD and iReboot (both from Neosmart.net) to help manage the bootloader entries and reboot into the right OS.

In terms of setting up the dual-boot again - as far as I know the rule of thumb remains that the last OS to be installed should be the newest one, on the basis that doing it any other way can leave you with a bootloader that can't address the other installation. So Win 7 should come first, then Win 8. I've done this using GParted to resize the partition (this usually works fine, though you need to boot into the OS and let chkdsk run its course afterwards, due to silliness where creating a new partition within Windows puts a file/marker right at the end of the filesystem - resizing the partition to recover empty space then removes this, and on next boot the removal causes a bit of a flap within the OS) and it's worked.

If you've already got a system with 7 installed as the most recent OS, you can always boot from your Win8 media, use the Repair My Computer option to automatically "fix" the bootloader, then use EasyBCD or bcdedit to find the Win7 install and add it to your bootloader config.

unkel

Sometimes I long for the good old days of boot.ini

NewsMeQuick

I wonder was it really just a bootloader issue?

I've come across that many times, and true enough, you pop the disk in and click repair, let it work it's magic. It just didn't work this time. Those 'startup' / 'login' errors in Windows 7 must be something else?

Fysh

NewsMeQuick wrote: »

I wonder was it really just a bootloader issue?

I've come across that many times, and true enough, you pop the disk in and click repair, let it work it's magic. It just didn't work this time. Those 'startup' / 'login' errors in Windows 7 must be something else?

It's difficult to say for sure but there have been a couple of updates recently enough that caused systems to have serious problems (including one Office update IIRC0) so it might have been something like that which then got worsened by the bootloader being reset.

Where possible I prefer to keep my dual boots on separate physical drives for reasons like this, with only the target drive being hooked up during the initial install. I've had some stupid experiences like an old desktop whose BIOS would silently switch the order of the SATA drives if either one was disconnected, without telling you - which led to me having a Win7 install on one drive whose bootloader was somehow on the other drive. And then there's stuff like VMWare's ESXi apparently formatting all connected drives during installation - fortunately I'd disconnected all my other drives when I was setting it up, would've been very annoyed to discover this otherwise as the setup process doesn't appear to warn you before doing so.

mp22

I have dual boots on several pc`s,the one thing I found is that you need to make the os you need to repair, the default boot os.