Cannot dual boot Windows 7 with Windows 10

[Kieran Sprouse]

Hi guys, hoping you can help.

I have Windows 10 installed on an SSD (Samsung 128GB drive) and I was hoping to dual boot with Windows 7 on another SSD (SanDisk 64GB drive) as I have a few games which refuse to launch in Windows 10. I shut down the PC, unplugged the Windows 10 drive and my 1TB storage drive do only the blank 64GB SSD I wanted to install Win 7 on remained. I went ahead and installed Windows 7 which worked fine.

I then plugged the drives back in and it went straight into Windows 10. I opened up Easy BCD, created a new entry for Win 7 and rebooted and the boot menu appeared. Selecting Windows 10 works a treat, but when you select Windows 7, a windows 10 style blue screen appears saying that Windows could not be started.


Any ideas what I am doing wrong? Should I make Windows 7 the default drive or will that mess Windows 10 up?


Cheers in advance,

Kieran

 

[mazboy]

You can't get dual boot that way. You need a genuine boot loader that is aware of the OSs as they are installed. If I were you, I would start over. Load Win7 on what you want to be your C:\ drive, then do this: https://www.howtogeek.com/197647/how-to-dual-boot-windows-10-with-windows-7-or-8/ You should be able to get away with putting Win10 on its own drive using this method.

I did the Win7/Win10 dual boot thing for about a year, and finally got frustrated with the whole back and forth reboot thing. I ended up building a computer strictly for Win10, then wiped the old computer and used it only for Win7 stuff. This is an elegant, if slightly expensive, solution. (I finally gave up on Win7 several months ago, and now I'm strictly a Win10 and Linux shop...).