I need to dual boot win7 and win 10 from 2 different drives: Help!

J

Joe45242

New Member
I want to dual boot win 7-64 bit and win 10-64 bit from separate drives. The OS is already installed on both of these hard drives. Win 10 is installed on a Samsung Evo 850 SSD drive, and Win 7 is installed on a Western Digital SATA drive. This is why I purchased Easy BCD, but I can't get it to work.

First, I started out with EasyBCD installed and configured on both drives. Then I tried it with EasyBCD on the Win 10 drive only. Neither of these configurations allowed the dual boot to work correctly. Now I am going to try putting EasyBCD on the Win 7 drive only.

I was reading on google that Windows 7 does not play well with newer versions windows unless you are doing a fresh install. This is what I thought EasyBCD was supposed to solve. Can someone please help. I've wasted my whole weekend on this. All of the user guide help and youtube tutorials seem focused on dual booting Windows with Linux, Mac OS and other open source platforms.

I don't need win 7 and win 10 to share data or access each other, I just need to find a way to make them either dual boot or just ignore each other during the booting process.

In other words, is there any way to make Win 10 ignore Win 7 when booting into Win 10 and vice versa. Make Win 7 ignore Win 10 when booting into Win 7.
 
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You must add an entry for W7 to the BCD on W10, i.e W10 is the system controlling the boot.
(No Windows OS bootmgr can recognize the boot loader of a later version as genuine, so you must use the newest as the controlling system.)
Installing EasyBCD is not sufficient. EasyBCD is not a boot manager, it's a utility which helps you manage the Windows boot manager's data repository.
It doesn't matter where you install it, but wherever it is (W10 is the logical place), you use it, i.e. run it when W10 is up and running to add an entry to the W10 BCD.
All subsequent boots of W10 will then present you with a boot menu at which point you can select the system you wish to run. You can also use EasyBCD to customize the descriptions of each system (should you desire), choose which is default (should you fail to make a choice) within the menu display time (which you can also set).
It's all described here
EasyBCD Basics
(Incidentally, you didn't need to buy EasyBCD. It's free for home use)
 
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