Vista/Win 7 RC Dual Boot DVD Effects

Before I take this step, I'd like to review what I'm seeing one more time.

If install disk NOT in drive:

Boot system.

Choices offered:

Vista (bcd entry to c:smile:
Win 7 (bcd entry to m:smile:

Vista choice works
Win 7 choice leads to winload signature failure.


If install disk IN drive (note, NOT being booted, just in place):

Boot system.

Choices offered:

Win 7 (bcd entry to c:smile:
Vista (bcd entry to e:smile:

Both choices work properly.

Note that the Win 7 and Vista choices are reversed from the situation when
the disk is NOT in the drive.

Does any of this make sense?

Thanks.
 
Y888 said:
Before I take this step, I'd like to review what I'm seeing one more time.

If install disk NOT in drive:

Boot system.

Choices offered:

Vista (bcd entry to c:smile:
Win 7 (bcd entry to m:smile:

Vista choice works
Win 7 choice leads to winload signature failure.


If install disk IN drive (note, NOT being booted, just in place):

Boot system.

Choices offered:

Win 7 (bcd entry to c:smile:
Vista (bcd entry to e:smile:
Click to expand...
Where did the e: partition come from? According to the Disk Management screenshot you posted earlier, there is no partition on your system with the e: drive letter. Do you mean that's the drive letter the Vista partition has from inside Win 7, and Win 7 has the C: drive letter?
Both choices work properly.

Note that the Win 7 and Vista choices are reversed from the situation when
the disk is NOT in the drive.

Does any of this make sense?

Thanks.
Click to expand...
That would seem to indicate that the disk contains its own copies of bcd and bootmgr. How all that plays out though, I'm not sure, but it would seem that in order for a BCD on the DVD to contain entries for all Windows systems already, there must be some kind of mechanism which scans the disk for Vista and Win 7 systems, and then adds them to the BCD as it sees them. But that's just a guess (I have never actually taken the time to study the inner workings of the Vista or Win 7 dvd systems).
Regardless, though, you should follow mine and Justin's advice in either renaming the winload.exe on your Win 7 partition, and then running Startup Repair (though if you do that, you should disconnect all but the vista and win 7 HDD, so it doesn't get confused), or if that fails, copying over the vista version into the windows/system32 directory on your win 7 partition.
 
OK. Ran the tests. Startup repair consistently claims everything is fine.

I copied over the Vista winload.exe (even though it's almost twice the size of the Win 7 winload.exe!) Result was that (with disk NOT in drive) the Win 7 choice boot process now stops with the same "digital signature" error, but this time pointing at the CI.DLL file instead of WINLOAD.EXE. Same error code number.

For the hell of it, I then did a complete reinstall of Win 7. No change. Boots fine from Win 7 choice if boot disk in drive, fails if boot disk not in drive, and the OS choices are reversed between those two conditions.
 
Yes, that's all I have available on the primary disk. And I suspect that putting it on a different disk than the Vista system would only make matters worse.

It really shouldn't be this complicated to do simple dual booting. It certainly isn't with Linux. Doing some searching, I find lots of other people with very similar problems, including some right here on this forum!
 
I'm not going to try take photos of it, and it's spread across several pages anyway. But it's straightforward.

Currently it's CD->HDD (however, system won't actually boot from CD/DVD in that configuration unless a key is pressed during the boot sequence). I've also tested it HDD->CD. No difference in terms of the problem.

The HDD subsequence has the SATA0 disk containing both the Vista partition (1st partition) and WIn 7 partition (2nd partition) as the first disk in the sequence.
 
This is a really bizarre problem, and does not make ANY sense. :smile: Just to be safe, take the disk out of the CD-ROM drive, put the HDD before CD, verify again that the Vista/Win 7 HDD is first on the HDD page in your BIOS, and attempt to boot. This is just ridiculous! :brows:
Just curious, but did you do a full format of the Win 7 partition before reinstalling?
 
Done. No difference in problem. Partition has now been reformatted several times (once even full format instead of quick) in the course of testing.
 
Naw. CRC is fine. Win 7 RUNS FINE ... as long as it is booted in the one way that works. The big clues, I think, are that it boots fine using the Win 7 choice if the disk is in the drive, but fails if the disk is out of the drive. And the choices for Vista/Win 7 are reversed in the disk in and disk out situations. This latter point I think is key -- it suggests that there are two separate copies of information on the drive(s), and only one of them is correct -- the one that we get bumped to when the disk is in the drive.
 
Ok, how about this idea:

Set the "active" flag (in Disk Management) to the Win 7 partition, instead of Vista, and then run Startup Repair again. At the very least, you ought to be able to boot both from the copies of BCD/bootmgr that will be on your Win 7 partition after you run Startup Repair, if you add an entry to boot the other OS with EasyBCD. Note you may have to run Startup Repair 3 times, since it can only seemingly fix one thing per pass.
 
Will this help given that so far the Win 7 choice has never worked without the disk in place? Even more critical, do I risk locking myself out of my primary Vista system if something goes wrong?
 
It may be the only way to fix your system at this point. Don't worry about not being able to get into Vista afterwards. You will be able to once you add a simple "Vista Longhorn" type entry to the new BCD using EasyBCD 2.0. Besides, you can always set the "active" partition back to Vista if you have to using Diskpart on the dvd, from the command promt:

Code: 
diskpart
select disk 0
list volume
select volume x
active
where the "x" is replaced with the correct volume number shown for your Vista partition by the "list volume" command.
 
Tried changing the active partition. The results were, uh, interesting.

I didn't have high hopes since the Win 7 partition about to be marked active did not have other key attributes like System, Boot, Page File. But I set it active anyway. Here are the results:

Booting with Win 7 DVD NOT in drive:

Missing BOOTMGR error during boot process. Everything stops.

Booting with Win 7 DVD IN drive:

Exactly the same as before changing the active partition from C (Vista) to M(7):

choice of:

Win RC 7
Vista

Both work correctly. But I can only get to this choice if the disk in the drive.

I've now set the active partition back to C so that I can boot Vista without the disk in the drive.
 
Check for the existence of a \boot folder and bootmgr on your other partitions (all HDDs) in case W7 installed its boot files on one of the other "active" partitions on the other HDDs. If you find it has, that's the disk that will need to be 1st in the BIOS HDD sequence.
 
That was it!

For some reason, the Win 7 install dropped its hidden boot files on a drive completely unrelated to the drive where the Vista and Win 7 installations resided -- perhaps because this other drive is the first one enumerated by the BIOS (but it wasn't the first one in the HDD boot order).

After I found those files, I switched the boot order to favor this other drive, and now I'm getting the working OS choice selection that previously only appeared when the boot disk was in the DVD drive.

So I declare this issue closed.

Thanks, all!
 
W7 seems to be a bit of a b*gg*r for randomly hiding the boot files.
Did you let it install to an empty space and do its own formatting ?
I've always pre-defined the partition I want it in, and the boot files have always stayed integrated, though I've never had it share a HDD with Vista.
 
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