Vista cannot boot W7 or 8, and W7 cannot boot W8, all for the same reason.
Newer versions of winload have a later dig sig than an earlier bootmgr.
The bootmanagers are backward, not forward, compatible.
If you'd installed W8, not cloned it, it would have seen and recognized the W7 boot files and taken over the boot by replacing them with its own.
As it is, you can either boot from the W8 partition by setting it active, and let W8 boot W7, or you can rename bootmgr on W7 and copy over the newer, bigger W8 version, which will not be confused by the signatures.
I'd recommend the latter, since you don't yet know whether the the W8 copy will fail to boot, which is highly likely if you've just copied it from a different PC.
Terry,
Thank you for your quick response. I tried your suggestion of replacing the Win7 winload.efi file with the Win8 winload.efi file. After messing around with permissions, I copied the Win 8 file over to the Win 7 \Windows\System32 folder. I tried to reboot into Windows 8, but it gave me the same error I discussed above. I tried to boot into Windows 7, but it wouldn't work either. I then changed everything back to the way it was, and I could boot into Win 7, but same problem with Win 8.
The Win8 install was an upgrade version that replaced an old XP install. I just moved the Win8 hard drive to the new computer, and it boots up just fine from that hard drive (MBR). When I migrated the Win 8 install over to the SSD with Win 7 (GPT), that is when I could not get the Win 8 install to boot.
Any other ideas?
Thanks again for your support.
---------- Post added at 07:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:41 PM ----------
Vista cannot boot W7 or 8, and W7 cannot boot W8, all for the same reason.
Newer versions of winload have a later dig sig than an earlier bootmgr.
The bootmanagers are backward, not forward, compatible.
If you'd installed W8, not cloned it, it would have seen and recognized the W7 boot files and taken over the boot by replacing them with its own.
As it is, you can either boot from the W8 partition by setting it active, and let W8 boot W7, or you can rename bootmgr on W7 and copy over the newer, bigger W8 version, which will not be confused by the signatures.
I'd recommend the latter, since you don't yet know whether the the W8 copy will fail to boot, which is highly likely if you've just copied it from a different PC.
Terry,
I also tried to make the Win 8 partition active (in both Windows Disk Management and Diskpart), but that doesn't work. The error code is as follows:
The selected disk is not a fixed MBR disk.
The ACTIVE command can only be used on fixed MBR disks.
It was worth a try ...
---------- Post added at 08:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:30 PM ----------
Vista cannot boot W7 or 8, and W7 cannot boot W8, all for the same reason.
Newer versions of winload have a later dig sig than an earlier bootmgr.
The bootmanagers are backward, not forward, compatible.
If you'd installed W8, not cloned it, it would have seen and recognized the W7 boot files and taken over the boot by replacing them with its own.
As it is, you can either boot from the W8 partition by setting it active, and let W8 boot W7, or you can rename bootmgr on W7 and copy over the newer, bigger W8 version, which will not be confused by the signatures.
I'd recommend the latter, since you don't yet know whether the the W8 copy will fail to boot, which is highly likely if you've just copied it from a different PC.
One last thing ...
After checking the info in BCDedit, it looks like the system is trying to boot from the Win 8 winload.efi file (see boot info below). Not sure why this doesn't work. Perhaps the OS is looking to boot from the winload.exe file used for MBR disks???
C:\Users\User1>bcdedit /enum
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume1
path \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {current}
resumeobject {5760b6cd-58bc-11e3-9bb8-a226aa93e6e2}
displayorder {current}
{5760b6d1-58bc-11e3-9bb8-a226aa93e6e2}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 3
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {current}
device partition=C:
path \Windows\system32\winload.efi
description Windows 7
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence {5760b6cf-58bc-11e3-9bb8-a226aa93e6e2}
recoveryenabled Yes
osdevice partition=C:
systemroot \Windows
resumeobject {5760b6cd-58bc-11e3-9bb8-a226aa93e6e2}
nx OptIn
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {5760b6d1-58bc-11e3-9bb8-a226aa93e6e2}
device partition=D:
path \Windows\system32\winload.efi
description Windows 8
locale en-US
osdevice partition=D:
systemroot \Windows