W7 and W8, 2 different HDs

bob-o92

Member
I've been searching this forum for how to do this and I think I've got it but I'd like to get confirmation before I screw something up.
I have a Dell 9010 with BIOS. I have Win7 Pro on one HD and Win8 Pro on another; each one was installed when it was the only HD connected, and each one works fine if it's the only HD connected. If I understand correctly, I should boot up Win8, install EasyBCD and add an entry for Win7, power down, connect the Win7 HD, boot up, and I should be presented with a screen asking which OS I want.
Have I got that right?
Thanks
 
Boot into W8 with both disks present.
You'll need to see what letter W8 uses to refer to the W7 HDD.
Start EasyBCD and add an entry to the W8 BCD for W7, pointing it to the letter discovered above.
Then on subsequent boots you'll have the choice of W7 or W8.
You can make W7 your default, but you'll always need to boot via the W8 BCD.
 
Boot into W8 with both disks present.
You'll need to see what letter W8 uses to refer to the W7 HDD.
Start EasyBCD and add an entry to the W8 BCD for W7, pointing it to the letter discovered above.
Then on subsequent boots you'll have the choice of W7 or W8.
You can make W7 your default, but you'll always need to boot via the W8 BCD.
Okay, thanks a lot.
 
It seems to work okay but from the appearance of the Dell splash screen to the boot menu it's 26 seconds. Is there a way to shorten that? (Sorry if that's in the docs somewhere; I have a patch on eye today so reading is not what I'm doing best right now.)
 
That should be the same time as before (though the boot screen wouldn't have been displayed then with no choice to make.)
This is what's happening

1.After pressing the power button, the PC’s firmware initiates a Power-On Self Test (POST) and loads firmware settings. This pre-boot process ends when a valid system disk is detected.
2.Firmware reads the master boot record (MBR), and then starts Bootmgr.exe. Bootmgr.exe finds and starts the Windows loader (Winload.exe) on the Windows boot partition.
3.Essential drivers required to start the Windows kernel are loaded and the kernel starts to run, loading into memory the system registry hive and additional drivers that are marked as BOOT_START.
4.The kernel passes control to the session manager process (Smss.exe) which initializes the system session, and loads and starts the devices and drivers that are not marked BOOT_START.
5.Winlogon.exe starts, the user logon screen appears, the service control manager starts services, and any Group Policy scripts are run. When the user logs in, Windows creates a session for that user.
6.Explorer.exe starts, the system creates the desktop window manager (DWM) process, which initializes the desktop and displays it.

So the boot menu (if it's displayed) comes in the middle of (2)
 
Turns out I may have been wrong about it working okay. (I wasn't sure what I was supposed to see.) This is what happened:
When I ran EasyBCD I accidentally wound up with 3 items in the boot list: Windows 8, Windows, and Windows 7. When I would reboot, after the splash screen it would come up to a boot menu that looked definitely like it belonged to Windows 8 and it had the three choices. Picking either W8 or W7 worked just fine. After I left that last post I decided to go back into EasyBCD and get rid of that extra "windows" entry. That seemed to work okay but now when I reboot it comes up to the Windows boot manager (white text on black). The Windows boot manager gives me the two choices, W8 or W7. Picking either one works just fine.
So am I supposed to have the boot manager that looks like Windows 8 or the Windows boot manager with the white text on a black screen?
 
There's an EasyBCD "metro" tickbox if you want the W8 graphic boot screen (what they originally called it before some trademark dispute).
Does this mean it's okay that I have the Windows Boot Manager? Because if it is I'll just stick with it.
Also read this
https://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=12890
if you're dual booting W8 or W10 with anything else.
It might explain an extra entry in the W8 boot menu.
Oh good, I read that thread before I ever started this and wanted to find it again but didn't know where it was.

But yeah, if it's okay that the Windows boot manager is coming up I'll just stick with it.
Thanks a lot.
 
No problem with using the old W7 command line menu.
I still use it on a W7/W10 dual boot. Since it's only around for two seconds a day at most, I can't understand why people get so obsessed with having "the pretty blue one".
Mostly I don't even see it. Having hit the power button I generally leave the PC to its own devices while I make tea and come back to a waiting desktop.
 
Actually, one more question:
I followed the instructions in that other thread for changing the power button in w8, and I can go back and forth between w7 and w8, and the desktop looks right in both of them. And when I boot into w8 everything's fine but when I go back to w7, after the desktop comes up the machine crunches for a very long time. I can open a program and start working and it's still crunching away.
Is there something else I need to change?
Thanks
 
Have a look in msconfig at the startup tab.
You've probably got many years worth of bloatware starting up various "time-saving" pre-loads and auto-update checkers and other such junk.
Go through and untick everything you don't want running on your PC 24/7
 
Are you talking just about your user\yourname...\startup folder ?
If so there are several other registry entries that bloatware uses.
msconfig will list them all from whatever source they're started (and tell you the source)
 
No, I'm talking about msconfig. It has only 8 items that I allow to... start up at startup. :smile: Like I said, I'm pretty ruthless with it.
 
Can't think of much else that could be doing that once you've got as far as the desktop.
Try starting task manager in startup and see if you can spot the task or service chewing CPU cycles.
Maybe one of your eight has gone rogue !
 
You can use Windows Performance Recorder to monitor what your system is doing and write it to a log on the disk, then open the log once the random activity has ceased with Windows Performance Analyzer to see a breakdown of which processes (or even system drivers, background services, etc) were responsible for CPU, disk, memory, and network activity.

It used to be a lot harder to use these tools, but they've really improved tremendously in recent versions of Windows. They're almost user friendly in Windows 10.
 
You can use Windows Performance Recorder to monitor what your system is doing and write it to a log on the disk, then open the log once the random activity has ceased with Windows Performance Analyzer to see a breakdown of which processes (or even system drivers, background services, etc) were responsible for CPU, disk, memory, and network activity.

It used to be a lot harder to use these tools, but they've really improved tremendously in recent versions of Windows. They're almost user friendly in Windows 10.
Okay, this is good to know. I'll give this a try.
Thanks a lot.
 
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