Windows 10: Attempted 8.1/10 dual boot, only boots to 10

I followed the How To Geek's guide on how to dual boot - sort of. I was unable to shrink my Win 8.1 boot partition in disk manager- it kept telling me my disk didn't have enough free space, in spite of the fact that it should have had plenty.

Win 8.1 is installed on my SSD, I also have a HDD. When I couldn't make room for a new partition on the SSD, I shrank one of the partitions on my HDD and created some room for Win 10 Enterprise preview. I then put the Win 10 iso into a USB thumb drive with the Windows 7 utility mentioned in the HTG guide, and installed to the free space on my HDD.

Win 10 loads and runs, but all of my drives and partitions are renamed under Win 10. I can run programs off of my SSD, although Visual Studio tells me it is missing a dll and won't run. When I restart, there is no multi boot option from Windows. I downloaded easy BCD and tried to offer one, but the option doesn't work. I can still only boot into 10

:)

 

Dual Boot Change from Windows 8.1 & 7 to Windows 10 & 7

I have a dual boot Windows 8.1 and Windows 7.

(1) Is it possible to have a triple boot Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7?

(2) If not, can I just upgrade the Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 to have a dual boot Windows 10 and Windows 7? Or do I have to do the normal dual boot set-up?

 

Dual Boot

I have my system in a Dual boot mode with a upgrade license , Vista & 8.1 . I would like to get out of the dual boot mode with only Windows 10 installed. Will Windows 10 upgrade go over the top , and delete the others leaving only !0?

 

I'd like to be able to dual boot, or failing that to boot into windows 8.1 again.

At the risk of throwing out a red herring, none of my drives are GPT partitioned, all are MBR.

 

This is what I have used as a work around. Since you can boot to 10 do this. Follow this path to get to your dual boot screen. Settings/ Update and recovery/recovery/advanced startup restart now/ use another os/ continue with another installed version/ choose an os*Tongue Welcome to TenForums and good luck with your install. Enjoy

 

The option to boot to Win 8.1 appears, but doesn't work. When I select it, my boot up gets stuck at the splash screen for my bios. I think the option only appears because I put it in via easy BCD.

 

I have Windows 8.1 installed on an SSD and Windows 10 on an HDD. In the bios I have it set to boot from the SSD so that when I turn on my system I get Windows 8.1. The only way I can get Windows 10 is to reboot an then press F8 during the boot process. That brings up a menu which allows me to select the Windows 10 HHD to boot.

I don't know if F8 will bring up a boot menu for your bios. Another method I found is to enter the bios setup and it allows me to manually select the boot drive.

Good luck with it.

 

yu gnomi. One of these disks is an external?

Using Easy Bcd, what letter designation did you put for windows 8?

 

neither is external

my SSD is C drive in Win 8.1, but in Win 10 it is letter i . So I used i in easy BCD.

When I choose that option, nothing happens- screen just stays black

 

You should, I would suggest, use C. in easybcd as the boot designation for windows 8. It will take over that designation on boot up.

 

added new entry for c drive as win 8.1 and deleted old one. Rebooted, selected that option and the result was a black screen with a band of light green lines across the top- suggested to me that the computer was 'stuck' trying to do something.

I think I will just re-install, I have already started to backup stuff I can't re-download, or re-install from media I have on hand.

 

I would suggest you to use commandline instead of EasyBCD in this case.
Note: I will use C: for Windows 10, D: for Windows 8.1 and E: for the boot partition
Jump to step 2 if your boot partition is already mounted (can be seen in explorer)
1: Press Win+X and open disk management. Select your boot partition, and assign a drive letter to it.
2: Press Win+X and open a commandline as administrator. Add a boot option for your Windows 8.1 installation using the tool bcdedit
For MBR boot this should look like this:
"bcdboot d:\windows /s e: /f BIOS /d /addlast"
3: Go to power menu (In Start or the Win+X menu), hold down shift on your keyboard and click on restart. Select the OS you want to use

 

I have three partitions assigned as OS on one of my drives. I installed Win 8.1 32 bit as a dual boot with XP. Then on the 3rd partition I installed Win 8.1 x64 to try with hardware, but some hardware isnt supported. I then started the Win 10 upgrade from the running Win 8.1 x64 and that went ok. Have Win 8.1, Win Tech Preview and other OS (XP) all bootable. I removed the rollback entry using the Boot Tab in MSconfig. Anyway thats how I did it, although I did notice in Win 8.1 after Win 10 was installed the task manager had been reset as if it had just been installed. Not sure if Win 10 did that.

 

Install 8.1 in one localdisk and 10 in other

 

*SmileIt worked great for me haha.*Tongue