Windows 7-Windows 7 dual boot issue

Question

My system has 2x320GB hard drives,each has a Windows 7 x64 installation, one for work and other for home, with prompt at boot to select an OS at boot.

I clean installed Windows 7 on the "home" hard drive recently(overwriting the old "home" one), after which I was able to boot into both home and work.

But now my system directly boots into the work Windows 7. Both hard drives are still detected. What do I do?

Answer 1

Have a look in the Startup and Recovery settings and see if the "Time to display list of operating systems" option is set. If not, this causes the default to boot without prompting.

You can get to it through Control Panel, System, Advanced tab and then by clicking the Settings button under the Startup and Recovery sub heading.

Alternatively, EasyBCD is very useful for editing the boot options if this fails to help.

Answer 2

I have a setup like this as well and the most reliable way to handle this is with a boot manager (I am using BootIT http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-next-generation.htm but there are others including a few open source ones). The primary advantage is when you boot through the boot manager it correctly toggles the active partition and the 2 installs can behave as truly independent. The other advantage is if you reinstall you boot into the partition you want to reinstall and any changes don't affect the other install.

Answer 3

After re-installing the home Win7, I made some changes to the HDD it was on. I created a partition out of some unallocated space the hdd had, which resulted in the HDD being converted to a dynamic disc(having 4 primary partitions). When this happens, Windows Disk Management warns you that you won't be able to boot from the drive.

However, EasyBCD and Windows Startup & Recovery still listed the Windows installation in the boot menus which resulted in me chasing an unattainable dream.

I unallocated the partitions and converted the HDD to a basic disc(using EASUS Partition Manager, I guess Disk Management would do too.) and restarted the box and voila!

Update: Did something similar the other day, with Gparted and I was working with 4 partitions on one disk(1 primary, 1 extended with three logical. wonder why I couldn't get that configuration on the win7 box?)