Dual boot Windows 8 Release Preview x64 and Windows 7

A

Arizona Willie

Member
I currently have Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit installed on a Corsair 128GB SSD and Windows 8 Release Preview 64 bit installed on a regular SATA3 platter drive.
I installed Easy BCD on Windows 7 and it boots into Windows 7 from the menu fine but will not boot into Windows 8. I get the error message about putting in my installation disk and it also says the winlogon.exe file signature is not recognized or some such.

I told Easy BCD to allow unsigned files but it didn't help.

I have a brand new Samsung 830D 256GB SSD that I haven't installed yet that I want to put Windows 8 Release Preview on.

I download and burned an .iso file of Windows 8.

I also have backups of my current Windows 8 Release Preview drive made with Acronis True Image 2012.

Should I boot with the Windows 8 installation disk and install then use Acronis rescue disk to restore my current Windows 8 drive over the top?

Or should I boot the Acronis rescue disk and restore the Acronis backup over the naked drive?

Or should I make one partition on the new drive first ( I think I need to do that if I don't use the installation disk ) then use the Acronis rescue disk to restore my backup to the new drive?

I'm wondering what kind of partition the Windows 8 installation disk will make GPT or MBR.

Currently all my drives are MBR.

All suggestions / jokes appreciated :smile:
 
Moved this to your own thread to be fair to the original poster in that other thread. Someone will help a.s.a.p.
 
OK, but I can't find where you moved it to :frowning:

What is the name of the thread you put it in?

Or have I mis-understood and you want ME to move it to a new thread?
 
The reason you're getting that error is because the BOOTMGR that you have on your drive does not support Windows 8. It sounds like Windows 8 failed to update the bootloader.

All you need to do is copy BOOTMGR from the Windows 8 ISO and replace it with the one on your boot partition.
 
Or perhaps you installed W8 with the W7 SSD disconnected, meaning that W8's bootmgr is on the W8 drive and did not place itself with W7 on the "system" drive.
In that case you can simply override the BIOS boot sequence at power-up and select the W8 drive and W8 will boot independently with no boot menu selection.
 
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