EasyBCD Dual Boot Win7 and Win10

[lindsay24]

So I'm a bit of a Windows 7 fanboy, but I would still like to have Windows 10 as a secondary OS on a separate drive in my PC. I've installed EasyBCD and made an entry for Windows 10 within the Windows 7 bootloader (Using Windows 7 as my primary OS), however when I try to select Windows 10 from the boot screen, it claims winload.exe is not signed and refuses to boot.

Both Windows 7 and 10 boot properly when I boot directly from their respective hard drives so I know neither OS has been damaged. It also will not let me into the F8 advanced boot menu for Win10 so I can disable it from checking driver signtures, throwing the same error as when I try to boot to it normally. I have booted into Windows 10 directly (without the modified Win7 bootloader) and disabled fast boot from the power options, as well as the following commands:

bcdedit -set loadoptions DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
bcdedit -set TESTSIGNING ON

Both commands ran successfully, but I still get the same digital signing error when I try to boot.

I've heard dual booting two versions of Windows is supposed to be easy, is there some simple solution to this? Or have I screwed something up?

I may also plan on adding Ubuntu in the future, but I have my priorities set on the two versions of Windows.

 

[USAFRet]

You have 2 valid licenses 1 for Win 7 & 1 for Win 10?
You have 2 individual partitions, 1 for each?
How did you install these OS's?

It should be easy, no EasyBCD needed. I did this between Win 7 & 8, Win 7 & 10, Win 8.1 & 10....no problem.

 

[lindsay24]

You have 2 valid licenses 1 for Win 7 & 1 for Win 10?
You have 2 individual partitions, 1 for each?
How did you install these OS's?

It should be easy, no EasyBCD needed. I did this between Win 7 & 8, Win 7 & 10, Win 8.1 & 10....no problem.

I have liscenses for each, as well as entirely seperate hard drives, not just partitions. I installed them one at a time, starting with Windows 7. I then unplugged the Windows 7 drive from my system while I installed 10 on the other drive to make sure nothing was interfered with. I then plugged the Windows 10 drive back in, booted into Windows 7 and added 10 to 7's bootloader.

Should I ditch EasyBCD? Could the problem be with that?

 

[USAFRet]

Installing the second OS (Win 10), with the first drive (Win 7) still connected, results in something like this:

This was the Win 10 Tech Preview and Win 7.

 

[USAFRet]

Now...if you want them totally separate, then yes, you do it with only that target drive connected.

 

[lindsay24]

I guess I'll reinstall 10 with the 7 drive connected and see what happens. If all goes well, how difficult will it be to add Ubuntu to the mix in the future? It's not essential, but I've wanted to try Linux for a while now.

 

[boyans]

An easy solution to dual-boot problems - Dual-boot Repair tool (for Windows 10, Windows 7 and earlier).

Completely separate installation of OS to single disk is maybe the best solution for novice users as they don't have to deal with Windows BCD dual-boot problems (some basic knowledge is needed for editing boot configuration data!). This method allows attaching of any number of disks to the system, where every disk contains a single OS installed. Dual/multi booting is done over one time boot selection key.

On UEFI firmware and GPT disk dual booting Windows and Linux is possible only over firmware boot manager and one time boot selection key.

On BIOS firmware and MBR disk dual booting Windows and Linux is done either:

1) using GRUB as main loader ( which can load Windows automaGically )

2) using Windows boot manager as main loader (and setup of a boot sector loader for Linux).