Dual boot problem with Vista and 7

Status
Not open for further replies.

fiend1182

Posts: 9   +0
Ok, I'll layout what's going on and pray that someone can help me because I'm going crazy.

I already had Vista Home Premium 32-bit installed. I installed Windows 7 Pro 64-bit (legit copy) on a different partition on the same drive. The installation went fine, Windows 7 came up and all was well. When I restarted the computer it went straight to Vista instead of giving me a boot menu. I checked the boot loader and there is no entry for Windows 7. Any ideas on what I can to to get the boot menu? Is the fact that one is 32-bit and the other 64-bit causing the problem. I'm not a computer genius but I am fairly knowledgeable. Any help is greatly appreciated.
 
Did you install 7 to a primary or logical partition? Secondly, you should be able to boot from the 7
DVD and enter the repair section.
 
I do think this is a 64 vs 32 bit issue. But it still should be resolvable. Unfortunately I don't exactly know how, but if I had to take a guess I'd say BCDedit would be how to fix it.

I don't know that that is the fix, but since you haven't confirmed davexnet's post worked or not, I'm giving you an alternative until someone comes along with a better idea. You may have to force it to use 7's bootloader by doing something from the 7 disk, and then bcdediting in vista stuff.

Again I don't know for sure, just some things to think about.
 
You are much better off installing 7 into a logical partition. Since the old days, convention says
only one primary can be "visible" at a time. Having 2 primaries, can cause issues down the line
and should be avoided unless you are fully aware of the ramifications.

I did it once and learned the hard way. I ended up using Partition Manager to do a primary >
logical conversion. SInce you just installed 7, much easier to do the iinstall again.
 
Ok, I ran the the repair from the Windows 7 disk, it gave me a boot menu the first time I started up but the next time it had magically disappeared.

As far as a logical partition, how does one go about creating one of those in Vista? At the moment I have 3 partitions on the HD. I bought the computer with Vista pre-loaded so I have the C: with Vista on it, D: is the recovery partition, and F: is where Windows 7 is. What exactly do I need to do to get this dual boot working?

Also, while messing with the partitions is it better to use the disk management utility in Vista or a third party tool.

Again, thanks for the help.
 
If you're prepared to delete your 7 partition and reinstall 7, open diskmgmt.msc in Vista.
Right click the the 7 partition and delete it. Now select the unformatted space, and create a
logical space (don't create the logical partition itself). That should be it.

Now reinstall windows 7 into that unallocated logical partition.
 
The only option it gives me is to create a primary partition.

I deleted the partition, right clicked the unallocated space, my only option was "create new simple volume", went through the wizard and a primary partition was formed. There was no option that had anything to do with anything logical.
 
Open diskmgmt, make it big enough so all the details are visible, take a screen
print and put it in here.
 
I noticed also that when I re-installed Win 7 that it made the M: drive an active partition. I have no idea why since I didn't put 7 on that drive or mess with it at all. All that was on it was back ups. Anyway, I moved my back ups and formatted the M: drive. At the moment there is nothing on that drive. It's an older IDE drive that I just have for back ups, I don't know if that has anything to do with anything just thought I'd throw it out there just in case.

It's telling me I need five posts to post an image so here is the 5th.
 
...And here is the image

diskmgmt.jpg
 
That's exactly what I did. It's just really strange how I can't get the dual boot to work. I had the same problem with beta Win 7 and never got it right. I just gave up and figured it would work out when I got the real version.

Thanks for the help. If any other suggestions come up feel free to shoot them my way. If I can figure something out I'll put it here so maybe someone else won't have this headache.
 
The problem was with the old IDE HD. I disconnected it and ran the repair from the Windows 7 disk, now the dual boot works just fine.

Thanks for the help.
 
Thanks for the update -
On my system, I've got Disk 0, IDE - just a data disk, and Disk 1 SATA. It contains the XP/
Vista/Linux partitions.. (I haven't tried 7 yet).
I have to enter the BIOS and set the boot device to Disk 1 otherwise the system doesn't boot.

Did you have your BIOS setup to boot from the 2nd hard drive ? Presumably you did
to get the setup you show in the above disk manager.

I suppose the install of 7 could have screwed up - It installed into the partition OK,
but mistakenly put it's boot loader on your old IDE drive , (disk0) under the impression
that that was the boot device?

Any way, glad it worked out.
 
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the bootloader was mistakenly being put on disk 0. That's why when I installed Windows 7 it kept marking the IDE drive as the active partition.

When I would try to repair from the 7 disk it kept saying something like there was no valid system partition I'm guessing because it was looking at disk 0 instead of 1.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back