Dual boot with one SATA and one IDE drive

T

tonyhoad

Member
brief computer specs:

P4D 3.4
4 gig RAM
Asus P5d2L main board
HD 6970 graphics
250 gig WD IDE drive
1 TB Seagate SATA

I want to setup a dual boot, using the same Win 7 Home Premium 32 disk (I believe this is legal, as the OS is only being used on one CPU) The idea is to use the IDE drive for internet and the other for my work which is a lighting engineer for the theatre.
The bios shows both drives on the Main section, but in boot priority, only the IDE drive is shown.

BCD only identifies the IDE Drive and that is the drive that now appears in the boot menu after running BCD.

Any thoughts about how to show both drives in the boot menu will be greatly appreciated??
 
Add a W7 entry pointing to the other drive if you need to after you've installed the second copy. (you might not need to as the second install will generally auto-dual-boot itself into the BCD of the first copy)
 
thanks Terry - will get back with the result - appreciate your prompt reply

Addendum:

Hi - added the entry for the SATA drive (twice) and got the following:

There are a total of 3 entries listed in the bootloader.

Default: Microsoft Windows 7
Timeout: 20 seconds
EasyBCD Boot Device: C:\

Entry #1
Name: Windows 7
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe

Entry #2
Name: Microsoft Windows 7
BCD ID: {default}
Device: unknown
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe

Entry #3
Name: Microsoft Windows 7
BCD ID: {14dcd933-4543-11e1-bb92-b2abe64d4236}
Device: unknown
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe

but only get one entry on the boot menu regardless which drive I boot from - the issue may be related to the fact that while the SATA drive shows on the main page of the BIOS, it does not appear in the boot priority section when both SATA and IDE drives are installed. This may account for the 'unknown device' entry above. I have updated the bios to no avail. When I got the above error (unknown device) i tried loading BCD on both machines and when I boot from the IDE I get the boot menu showing only Windows 7, and when I have to disconnect the IDE drive to boot from the SATA drive I get the boot menu showing Microsoft Windows 7

Any thoughts? if it's too hard I can simply use two machines although I do like to undersand how and why and this puzzles me a bit.

cheers
 
Last edited:
What letter does your original W7 give to the SATA partition containing your new installation of W7 ?
 
thaks Terry - worked like a charm - very impressed with the way yoou dealt with it, much appreciated.

Wonderful how things become obvious when someone tells you how to do it!!
 
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