How to drive to start boot process from.

L

lwesker

Member
I have older machine with original Win 7 drive (moved to SATA1). Installed win 10 on a second hard drive as (SATA0). I put EasyBCD on the Win 10 install to allow me to pick from either OS, which works great. So easy.

However the BIOS default boot is set for Windows Boot Manager via UEFI, but is always picking the SATA1 drive to start from and boot straight into Win7. Note this problem already existed before EasyBCD, when I reattached the SATA1 after finishing Win10 setup on SATA0.

So I am being forced to use the BIOS override to force boot on SATA0 at which time the EasyBCD options come into play.

How can I set priority of the two drives so the BIOS goes into SATA0? Or is this a hardware limitation of my machine? I don't want to alter or delete the SYSTEM partition of the original Win7, making it impossible to directly boot into Win7 ever again.
 
Instead of using a temporary BIOS override, edit the BIOS by repeatedly tapping "del" (on most PCs - the splash screen should tell you) as you power up.
In the BIOS "Boot" Page you can not only change the priority sequence e.g. DVD before HDD, but the priority within each of those i.e. which HDD comes first.
If it's a Dell or some other OEM that won't allow a HDD priority change, swap the data cables between the two drives.
 
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Thanks Terry, but already tried both of those.

Already had tried swapping the SATA0 and SATA1, no impact. Always booting from older Win 7 drive by default.

Also the BIOS does not have adjustment for drive priority within EUFI. Only a single Windows Boot Manager can be put before or after USB, CDROM, etc. But can't pick which of the two bootable drives within the Windows Boot Manager. There is separate order that can be assigned with Legacy.

Also the BIOS (an HP American Megatrends circa 2012) places EUFI before Legacy and does not allow to reverse order. Only way I could make it work was to completely disable the EUFI Boot Manager option and do Legacy only, then place desired Win 10 drive first. Undesirable.

I was hoping for a way in EasyBCD (but maybe some other utility you know of) that can make a drive not bootable at all, but in a temporary and recoverable way. Obviously I can simply delete the System partition on the Win 7 drive, but then not recoverable.

I see Easy BCD has way to make any partition bootable, but I don't see a way to turn a bootable partition off, to allow the BIOS to skip over it.
 
Can you post a screenshot of your Disk Management and EasyBCD "view settings"
 
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