Quad booting issues

Apollo702

Member
Hi,

Let me see if I can explain my situation and figure out some answers. On my custom built rig I had Windows 7 and 8.1 installed on different partitions on an SSD(C and B partitions.) Something went wrong and both stopped working and I had to wipe the drive and start fresh.

I got 8.1 up again and I have spent quite a while working on it, installing programs, customizing it... and it is time to re-install 7, add 10 and Linux Mint Cinnamon. Perhaps at a later date I will include Apple in a VM- but I gave up on directly creating a Hackintosh.

The setup is supposed to work like this. I now have 4 drives:

SSD 1 which should be the OS drive with 4 partitions.

SSD 2 is the recently acquired program drive(P) where all programs should go- rather than installing them several times. At the moment most programs are located on the C drive and they will need to all be moved. I wish that there was a way to force programs by default to point to a custom location...

HD is the data drive(D)

External HD (X) is the backup drive.

Anyways, when going to reinstall 7 for some reason it wont install. I can't boot from it and I can't install it when 8.1 is up either. That just gives errors and fails. In fact, I am not sure if it is related- but (only a few) other programs suddenly can't (re)install.

So, what do I need to do to make this all work? I will share any other information, settings... that it takes to make this happen. Please include Easy BCD settings, Bios settings... and tell me what I need to know.

Thank you in advance!
 
You'll have to tell us the specific errors you get for us to be of any help as your setup should work as described.
 
For Windows 7 it gives an unexpected error.

For the other programs I will break them down:
Paint.net= 1603 error
Windowblinds WinFX =SdDisplay and sometimes Windows script hosts.

I am going to include a few screenshots.
 

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You can't get away with installing a program once and making it available across a range of systems, unless it's extremely old, i.e. pre-dates the use of the registry, or it's a specifically portable version, in which case you can simply put a shortcut to its .exe on your other systems.
I've had problems with Windows setup in the past, where it refuses to go in the place I allocated, constantly trying to put the boot files elsewhere and unable to find free space.
It will also have a problem if there's insufficient space in the "active" partition, where it will always put the boot files.
Is this a UEFI PC or legacy BIOS ?
 
One "trick" is to run the setup in each OS, but select the same folder as your destination (so they share binaries, but the registry entries are separate). That works well enough for most software, though I wouldn't do it given how cheap disk space is these days.
 
My MOBO has UEFI. It is a Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P R.

As far as the software I got a 256GB SDD figuring that would be enough for the OSes. It would really suck wasting that much storage space if I was forced to do several installs of each though. The other issue is some of the downloaded games could have DRM issues. I am wondering if they would think that there were more installs than they really had. So far I have installed many of the games- but only a few regular programs on the P(program) drive and at least so far that appears to be working.
 
Nobody has answered my main questions. What is blocking installations? Also, what do I need to do in order to be able to boot from a disc again?
 
I did- and I got nowhere. I like PDN- but much of it's support was written in about 2006-2008. Those 1603 error pages largely proved fruitless and in the end the only thing that allowed me to re-install it was a system restore- but I never truly isolated the culprit.
 
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