Dual boot windows 7 and 10

[julian64]

So I have a computer running windows 7. For strange reasons I don't want to upgrade it, but I do want it to have the ability to dual boot windows 10.

I therefore created a 10 USB drive rebooted on the usb drive and installed windows 10 on a new SSD put into the machine

If I start the machine it always boots into windows 10. If I look in the bios the windows boot manager is selected as the boot drive.
If I select the old windows 7 hard disk drive from inside bios than it boots up a perfectly functional windows 7 machine. Both machines can see all the drives.

Problem is that I thought when you did this the windows boot manager asked you on startup which operating system you would like to boot from. If I go into recovery boot options from the window 10 I don't even see the opportunity to boot into an alternative operating system.


What am I doing wrong?

[The_Burg]

Pretty sure you need to install 10 from within Win 7 and then use a different directory / drive. You should then get the option on boot.

Been a while so this may have changed.

[julian64]

Hmm. any idea how to make it dual boot now I have two working operating systems rather than deleting it all and starting again?

[julian64]

I keep seeing multiple videos like this, and this was the exact one I copied. He isn't installing through windows 7, he is simply booting off a DVD he created?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApNeefM3pks

However when I try this no menu appears it just boots 10. I can change this in bios, but having exactly copied what he does I get no menu coming up.

Someone must be dual booting who could help me out?

[Penelope Stopit]

I dual boot Debian Linux and Windows 7 on seperate SSD's but not W10 and W7 hence I'm not 100% on this but....
This video shows a dual boot install of W10 and W7 that works, the thing is you may have already messed up the windows boot loader
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApNeefM3pks

If you have got a problem with the windows boot loader and don't want to start all over again, EasyBCD should sort it for you
https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

[Penelope Stopit]

Ooops crossed posts

[Penelope Stopit]

I'm guessing here but.....If W7 is installed using a BIOS Set for MBR (Master Boot Record) and W10 is installed and the BIOS is set to EFI then this could be the problem

Here is a page showing a fix using EasyBCD https://www.tenforums.com/installation-upgrade/257...

Edited by Penelope Stopit on Friday 31st May 14:09

[budgie smuggler]

Search for EasyBCD, that should get you looking down the right path.

Basically you need to edit the boot loader database, which has replaced boot.ini from older versions of Windows.

This will then give you the option to select the OS at boot.

Edited by budgie smuggler on Friday 31st May 14:42

[julian64]

Penelope Stopit said:

I'm guessing here but.....If W7 is installed using a BIOS Set for MBR (Master Boot Record) and W10 is installed and the BIOS is set to EFI then this could be the problem

Here is a page showing a fix using EasyBCD https://www.tenforums.com/installation-upgrade/257...

Edited by Penelope Stopit on Friday 31st May 14:09

Okay that's brilliant. That gives me a load of info to go and play with that I didn't seem to find with my daft google searches. Thanks very much for that

[Penelope Stopit]

Dual booting is a real pain at times and when the OS's are on seperate drives it all becomes more painful

I cheated by downloading and running a tool that fixes all Linux/Windows dual boot problems and it did work

What I didn't know was that someone has built a tool for Windows only dual booting....I now know

Here it is (download link near the bottom of the page) https://www.boyans.net/dual-boot-repair-windows-10...

[hutchst]

I don't know if this will help, because I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I recently set up a dual boot setup on a new NUC. It's Win10 + Linux, but I don't suppose that matters, it's still 2 independent operating systems. Also they both live on separate partitions on the same ssd, one ext4 and one NTFS.

But I went round and round in circles re- installing over and over again and couldn't get it to work. Then I read something about switching off legacy boot option in the BIOS menu, and use UEFI. It worked first time, boots into a grub menu (which I think I can edit, but I don't want to) and if I do nothing for 10 seconds it defaults to Linux.

I don't know what motherboard or BIOS you have, but there might be something in there to change.

Edited by hutchst on Friday 31st May 16:08