driver signature issue with Win 7 with Win 10 dual boot

W

wileydog

Member
Dell 8700, Windows 10 and Win 7 Pro, 64 bit, 2 hard drives, separate data drive
Get the opening option menu showing both options. Booting to Win 10 works ok, booting to Win 7, I get the "error window" shown in the attached file. Pressing 'F8' shuts the machine down, and 'ESC' sends me to the 'second window' file attached to this post. Note, Win 10 is on a 1TB HDD, and Win 7 is on a SSD
 

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Last edited:
You can't boot a newer Windows from an older.
Each new system is backwards compatible, knowing the dig sigs of all previous versions, but none of them can possibly be forwards compatible, i.e. know in advance what the dig sig of a future OS will be.
You must boot W10, and add W7 to its BCD, not the other way round.
If that's not the problem, I note that it's trying to call winload.efi which shows you are on a UEFI GPT PC.
Are both Windows installed on GPT drives ?
 
Hi, thanks for your prompt reply. So, this morning, I got a very professional looking screen with a blue background (not the dreaded blue screen of death) that gave me the option of Windows 10 or 7. However, it still reverted to the error screen I attached earlier when I chose Windows 7.

I think the Win 7 SSD is GPT because I once used that drive along with a set of mirrored HDD's for my data.

A little background. This Dell shipped with Windows 8, I pulled the HDD with the Win 8 OS and shelved it. Bought a SSD and installed my Win 7 on it. I used this almost exclusively. Then in March, I took out the SSD and popped in the Win 10 HDD, sat through a couple of reboots until the system stabilized and then upgraded that HDD to Win 10. I again shelved that drive and reinstalled my SSD with Win 7 which I have been using since then. Earlier this week, I pulled the SSD drive, and put the HDD (with Win 10) back in. I let it stabilize, then got EasyBCD, installed it, configured it per the instructions and then put my SSD back in. I booted into Windows 10 and the system saw the SSD. In Computer Mgmt, I changed the SSD drive letter to Z:, pointed the Windows 7 option in EasyBCD to drive Z:

Hope this is clear. I have the discs for Win 7 which I purchased at retail.
 
If you look in "view settings" to check whether the boot loader being called is winload.exe or winload.efi, then use EasyBCD > File > Select BCD store and point to the BCD on W7 and check the winload there, they should be the same.
If one is .efi, and the other is .exe, then that's your problem. A UEFI system cannot boot Windows from MBR disks, though you can boot a GPT system from bootmgr on an MBR boot drive (using the .exe loader in compatibliity mode)
That's subject to the older/later restriction already mentioned of course.
If you want to boot GPT W10 from an MBR W7, you will need to replace the W7 bootmgr with its non-EFI equivalent from the W10 OS.
 
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