Dual Booting Windows 8.1 64 Bit & Windows 7 32 Bit.

Gibbo60

Member
Hi all. I’m new to this forum & am looking for advice on dual booting. I have recently purchased a Lenovo G500 laptop which has Windows 8.1 64 bit preinstalled. I need to run some software that won’t run on a 64 bit system. My question is this; is it possible, with or without EasyBCD, to install & dual boot a copy of Windows 7 Pro 32 bit on top of the preinstalled Windows 8.1 64 bit? I've tried this by disabling both the fast startup and UEFI secure boot in the Windows 8.1 setup. The installation of Windows 7 gets so far, but then I get the message, ‘windows cannot be installed to this disk the selected disk is of the gpt partition style’. Any help or advice regarding this would be very welcome.
 
Hi all. I’m new to this forum & am looking for advice on dual booting. I have recently purchased a Lenovo G500 laptop which has Windows 8.1 64 bit preinstalled. I need to run some software that won’t run on a 64 bit system. My question is this; is it possible, with or without EasyBCD, to install & dual boot a copy of Windows 7 Pro 32 bit on top of the preinstalled Windows 8.1 64 bit? I've tried this by disabling both the fast startup and UEFI secure boot in the Windows 8.1 setup. The installation of Windows 7 gets so far, but then I get the message, ‘windows cannot be installed to this disk the selected disk is of the gpt partition style’. Any help or advice regarding this would be very welcome.

Any advice please?
 
UEFI Windows on GPT drives are very fussy about installing other Windows to MBR drives.
I had a similar problem putting W10 into a space on an MBR HDD from my W7/W8.1 GPT SSD. (i.e. It refused to do it)
I managed to install it by hiding my SSD in the UEFI BIOS boot sequence.
W10 installed, creating its own BCD on the MBR HDD, from which I was able to multi-boot the original two SSD OSs.
You could do the same with W7, but you won't be able to use the W7 BCD to boot W8.1 (it will fail with an invalid digital signature trying to chain the 8.1 loader).
You'd need to overwrite the W7 bootmgr with the W8.1 version to overcome the inv dig sig.
 
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