No luck trying to use EasyBCD to boot Win7 and Win8 from different physical drives

HFox

New Member
I have my laptop configured with two internal physical hard drives. One drive (the original) has Windows 7 Ultimate x64 installed, and the second drive has Windows 8 Pro installed. By pressing F12 during startup I can stop at the system boot menu and select the drive to boot from. In both cases, the appropriate Windows version boots and runs without any problems. So why am I here?

I'm basically forgetful, and will frequently power up and miss the opportunity to press F12 in time, causing a default Windows 7 boot. Not a huge deal but, of course, I have to wait for the login screen then restart. I was therefore hoping to utilize EasyBCD to handle the "menu" options for me so that I would always be prompted before starting one OS or the other.

I added both OSes to the boot menu but did not make any advanced sort of option changes. After re-starting I get the boot menu with both OS options available, and selecting Windows 7 works fine. Unfortunately, trying to start Win8 always results in an error indicating that the digital signature of the winload.exe file cannot be determined. I've been reluctant to try any of the "repair" options, as that has only caused me grief in the past when trying multi-boot configurations.

Is there any relatively easy (harmless) way to make this work such that I don't risk corrupting my Windows 7 drive which would be a real disaster?

All help/suggestions appreciated.
 
You need to configure your BIOS to boot from the Windows 8 drive as default, then use EasyBCD *from there* to add Windows 7 (vs the other way around as you did it).
 
I have the same problem.

Because I have installed Windows 7 on a SSD Drive andWindows 8 on a harddisk I do not want do use the Windows 8 drive as default.

Is there still no other way to solve the "digital signature" problem
 
Copy the W8 bootmgr into the W7 root (rename the W7 version first, so you can switch back when you decide to abandon W8 as a waste of effort)
 
Back
Top