Intermittent Odd Boot Behaviour With Vista/Win 7/Win 8 Multi-Boot

Ex_Brit

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I'm posting this in case others experience it so whatever is said here may help them.

I multi-boot and have Vista as my main OS but every now and again, despite my EasyBCD (2.2.0.182) settings, Windows 8 will boot up when I turn the system on and go to its boot choices screen and ask me which OS I wish to set as my main OS.

Has anyone experienced this and I'm wondering why it does it. It's only a minor inconvenience as it hardly ever happen and I have no idea what triggers it.

It happened this morning and I don't recall any major update to Windows 8 lately that might have altered anything in that OS, all I know is that I was working in Windows 8 before shutting down last night.

Bizarre but I suppose one could say it makes life interesting....!! :wink:
 
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Interesting, thanks Terry. That means Windows 8 RTM isn't obeying shut down commands properly.
I'll have to look into that when I get a moment or three.
It only happens once in a blue moon anyway so I'm not overly worried about it.
 
MS have redefined the meaning of "shut-down" in W8.
Because I use HnS (hence grub) as my boot manager, and chain XP/Vista/7/8 individually from that, W8 cannot wrest control from me, whether or not it was "last-up".
I have not noticed it being "fast" when I do boot it, indeed I think it's slower than W7 to the desktop, though I haven't put a stopwatch on it to check, but I'm not booting it much at present.
Until they release MC for W8, it's not a lot of use to me.
I've customized it to replicate W7 desktop with Classic Shell and installed my normal applications (I feel I have to spell it in full to distinguish desktop apps from the silly metro fullscreen versions), changed all the file associations to eliminate jumps back to metro for photo, pdf, video viewing, and it's generally working quite nicely, but it's still completely inconceivable to switch to it from W7, while it lacks Media Center.
I have several Tb of movie and TV recordings all neatly and attractively indexed and controlled with Media Center Master and Media Browser hooked into WMC, linked through to my sitting room TV from the HDMI output of my graphics card.
None of it's usable through W8 till they include the bits they've omitted from the RTM.
Also I can't use it for Banking because the browser security add-on provided by my Bank isn't compatible with W8 yet. (though that's not MS's fault obviously)
 
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I do find it boots faster than other OS's, but I suppose that would vary depending on one's setup. As far as customizing it is concerned I've hacked Windows Mail and Calendar into it and they work perfectly and W8 even recognizes them as default programs, so I now have a desktop email client as with my previous OS's.....a desktop that is set to appear instead of the Start screen because I also use Stardock's Start8 which is in beta only at the moment but works fine. I prefer working from the desktop although I do like the Metro Start screen in other ways. Start8 gave me back the Start button and a fully functional Start Menu that MS took away with the RTM version. I've also setup Quicklaunch as I prefer it to those rather large pinned objects that take up too much real estate on the taskbar.

I haven't tried my banking website yet, I'll certainly check that out. W8 should be getting Media Center on or around the 26th October and I believe they'll offer it free for while. In the meanwhile I've been using the software that came with my TV Tuner card but it's severely limited and only covers TV watching rather than media in general.

The one major flaw in 8 is Microsoft have made it very difficult for people like me who multi-boot to use one of their own Bluetooth keyboards across multiple OS's (Wireless Entertainment 8000 Keyboard and Mouse). The mouse is fine as it works across all my OS's but the keyboard must use a passkey in Windows 8 which breaks it in the other OS's. Previous systems allowed the passkey to be bypassed in turn allowing it to be used across all OS's. I've searched high and low for a way to stop that dreadful metro device installation page taking over as I am sure the old driver installation windows are there, hidden away somewhere as I saw them with previous builds.
So I'm faced with a strange situation of having the world's most modern OS and forced to use a wired keyboard in it. Fortunately I always keep it hidden but hitherto have only needed it for BIOS or Safe Mode access, so I simply haul it out when I boot over to 8.
 
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I looked at Start8, but reading between the lines, it felt like it might stop being free as soon as it left Beta, so I went for a definitely-free alternative.
One other thing I've noticed which might, or might not be W8 related, is that since installing it and accessing my shared data HDD from it, that I keep being told in W7 that I don't have permission to access my photos, music, documents etc.
I spent a good few hours yesterday playing around in Windows security, taking ownership of all my own stuff back and deleting a series of "unknown" users with obviously system-generated names.
It remains to be seen what happens next time I access them from elsewhere.
 
Am in Win 8 now. To go back to a previous post, I just checked my online banking and various credit card websites in both Firefox and IE10 and they all work fine. Not sure whether it has anything to with my setting IE to always do Compatibility View or not though.

Yes I got the same permission popup when trying to view files across drives but found that all I need to do was to follow through with the prompt once in each case to get permission and that was it, no fiddling with actual individual permissions.

Addendum

BTW yes Start8 is $4.99 US. I don't mind that as it's the best of the bunch I've tried.
 
It's not the banking websites that don't work. My bank gave me a free IE add-on (called Rapport) which runs against their URL (and multiple other banks) and monitors in real-time for active malware like key-loggers which might be trying to intercept sensitive confidential security information to access the account with later.
It doesn't work with Maxthon, so it's the only thing I use IE9 for on W7.
It's not yet available for W8/IE10, so I don't access any accounts from W8. (I could, but I don't)
The problem with the access was more annoying than that. OK, I could just click on "authorize" when prompted, but that wasn't the only problem.
One reason I wanted my start menu back on W8 is because I have the W7 start set to expanding menus, so if I'm looking to play a particular song, I don't need to open WMP and search down through the library, or open Explorer and click on folder after folder, I just hover over Start > Music > Paul Simon > Hearts and Bones > Train in the Distance, for example, as each layer pops out and one click later, there's the music.
This permission problem means I hover over Music and see "(empty)" (likewise for Documents, Photos, Downloads etc etc) and it takes a right click > properties > security etc to re-establish the chain of connection, and it keeps happening.
 
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