Windows 10: Please, evaluate my W10 / W7 dual boot project.

I have been recently upgraded from Win7 Home x64 to Win 10.
Initially I was planning to quickly roll back to my old good Win 7. *Wink
But turned out I like Win10 more than I expected, so decided to make it my main OS from now on and use Win7 (I need it anyway, because of my old printer/scanner not supported by Win 10) as an additional OS in dual boot rig.

My upgraded W10 has been installed on my main 3TB Seagate HDD (with UEFI). I would like to wipe it out and do the clean install of W10 Anniversary edition as soon as ISO of its final version is available.

What I'm going to do next is :
1. remove above mentioned 3TB Seagate HDD from my tower and replace it with my other HDD - 500 GB Samsung.
2. clean install or rather restore from the image Windows 7 on this 500 GB Samsung HDD.
3. while Win 7 is already in place (on Samsung) - add up my main 3TB Seagate HDD with empty OS partition (or should it be an unallocated space ?).
4. Clean install Anniversary edition of Windows10 on it (Seagate) and mark it as my main OS from that time on.

I might have couple of detailed questions later on, but please tell me for now : is this scenario correct ? Any suggestions would be appreciated. *Smile
Thanks in advance.

:)

 

Creating Dual Boot of Windows 7 and WIndows 10

Original Title: W7 and W10 together?

Since WMC is missing in W10, can I keep W7 and install W10 for dual boot?

 

Age of Empires 2 The Age of Kings won't work on Win 10.

I have a dual-boot machine with XP-32 (installed first) and W10 (former W7-64). So it is possible to have a dual-boot.

To do it : you have to install XP first, then W7. W7 "installs" a dual-boot menu. Thus you can choose the os you want to start with.

Then you upgrade W7 to W10. You still have the os menu choice at startup.

 

That will basically work, but if it was me I would put both OSs on same 500 GB drive and use 3TB drive for data.

Two main reasons

1) boot sectors all reside on same drive as OSs

2) You can image backup 500 GB drive to 3TB drive.

So I would restore image of 7 to 550 GB drive, shrink C drive as much as you want, then install 10 in unallocated space.

 

The first thing you have to do to meet the conditions of the EULA (End Users License Agreement) is to purchase a second license for Windows. If you took advantage of the free upgrade to Windows 10, then you have only 1 license for Windows and 1 license means only 1 installed and activated copy at a time. You are wanting to run two copies of Windows from the same license, violating the EULA. It violates the rules of this forum for us to help you do that.

From the Windows 7 EULA:

From the Windows 10 EULA:

I hate to sound nit-picky but we don't like getting banned on this forum (even temporarily) for violating the forum rules.

 

I actually didn't say a word in my post about licenses I DO own; So why are you so quick to accuse me of crimes I've never committed or planed ? . *Huh

Guess what, not very nice welcome as for an absolute W10 forums beginner like me (it's my very first post here).
If you care so much of not getting banned, you would probably need to change your unfriendly / unhelpful attitude - first of all.

 

I apologize if it sounded like I was accusing you. I didn't mean to because you will note in my reply:

A simple reply of "I have two licenses for Windows" would have certainly been sufficient to clear up the misunderstanding.

Now, there are basically two ways of setting up dual booting. One is to have completely separate installs of both the Operating Systems and the boot files (system partitions) on separate drives and use the bios/UEFI boot menu to determine what gets loaded. To set that up, you install each OS on it's own hard drive with only that hard drive/SSD connected. Then you do nothing else and use bios/UEFI to determine which drive boots.

If you want to set up software dual booting from the Windows boot menu, what you want to watch out for is what physical drive you want the boot files (system partition) to be installed on and used from. The way I prefer to do that is to do as you suggested. Install Windows 7 on the Windows 7 hard drive, with only that hard drive connected. Then remove it and install Windows 10 on it's hard drive. I prefer to do clean installs to drives with nothing but unallocated space on them and let Windows setup make it's own partitions.

When you get Windows 10 set up and booting, add the Windows 7 hard drive back as the second drive. Boot into Windows 10. The Windows 7 OS partition will get a drive letter (and probably a few other partitions as well). Let's say Windows 7 gets F: for a drive letter. Open a command prompt (admin) in Windows 10 and add the Windows 7 to the boot menu using the following command:

BCDBOOT F:\Windows /d /addlast

Adjust the path in red to reflect whatever drive letter the Windows 7 partition gets.

Then you can adjust the timeout for the boot menu and the order the Operating Systems appear in the boot menu by running MSCONFIG (boot tab). I think you can edit the names of the Operating Systems as well.

You can also adjust the drive letters assigned using disk management. You'll probably have drive letters assigned to extra recovery and system partitions that you will want to remove (remove the drive letters, not the partitions, unless you really want to remove the partitions themselves). You can reassign the drive letter of the Windows 7 partition and it will not affect the boot menu - the boot menu does not operate on drive letters, it operates on partitions IDs.

You will end up with an extra system partition and recovery partition on the Windows 7 hard drive. I prefer to leave them there because if the primary hard drive fails and the computer won't boot from it, all you have to do is disconnect it and boot from the Windows 7 hard drive into Windows 7.

I hope that information is helpful.

 

Thank you for your fast reply and suggestions.

Here are my 2 reasons, why I've chosen to put my 2 OSes on 2 different HDDs :
1) this option is safer in case of disk failure (2 HDDs won't probably fail in the same time),
2) I'm planning to migrate to SSD (with my main OS - W10 only) late Fall this year anyway.

BTW.
I store all my backups on external portable disk drive anyway.
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Should I install my OSes with the other HDD disconnected ? Is it the same in case of first and the second OS ?
Some people give such recommendation, but not all. So what's the science behind it ?

 

The reason for installing the OS on the hard drive with only that hard drive connected is so that you know for sure where the system partition with the boot files is created. Lots of people have added SSDs to their computers, left their hard drives connected, installed Windows as a clean install on the their SSDs. Then they wipe the old hard drive not realizing that Windows setup used the old system partition on the old hard drive for the boot files and they are left with a non-booting system.

 

Thank you very much for lots of useful information ! I appreciate it very much. *Biggrin

Years back I used to have dual boot rig of Windows7 / Windows XP and then Windows7 x64 / Windows7 x32.
What I remember from that time - it was essential the older OS had been installed BEFORE the newer one.
Is this rule (the order of installations) still important ? Looks like not really... Am I right ?

Sorry, it might sound silly but I hope I won't be needing to go to UEFI each time I boot to determine what will get loaded. .... *Wink

I have to use UEFI/GPT on 3TB drive (Win10), but what would you advice me to use on the second, much smaller (500 GB) HDD (Win7) - UEFI/GPT or BIOS/MBR and why ? (possible advantages / disadvantages).

Please note : my smaller drive is empty so I'll be able to install Windows7 on unallocated space there.
But it's not the case on 3TB HDD (Windows10), that is fully partitioned and need to stay that way.
Beside the main OS, it contains / stores huge amount of my (user) data (~~2TB).
Please check the screenshot below for reference (DM of my 3TB HDD).

[C partition wasn't yet renamed after upgrade to Windows7]

 

I'm not sure what do you mean by "recovery partition" ? Hidden UEFI recovery partition, created automatically during any UEFI system installation ?

However re. Disk Management screenshot of my 3TB HDD from the previous post :
I think this 450MB hidden partition to the right of C:\ drive, that I never created myself - is just that UEFI recovery partition. Am I reight ?
Most probably it's been created during the recent Windows10 upgrade.
Could you or somebody else inform me what is it for ?

 

My guess is that it's for launching Win RE so that one can run certain Windows recovery procedures... like the useless startup-repair thing.

 

If you are going to install the Operating Systems on two separate hard drives, then it doesn't matter which one you do first. What matters is which one you boot into when you add the second OS to the boot menu. If you are going to install both Operating Systems on the same hard drive, in two different partitions, then you should install the oldest one first - but with Windows 10 and Windows 7, it isn't disastrous if you install Windows 10 first.

You eliminate the need to do that by adding the second OS to the boot menu of the first OS.

Someone else might be more experienced, have better advice than me. If it were me, I think I would do BIOS/MBR on the second hard drive. I think it might be easier to install Windows 7 that away and work better adding it to the Windows 10 boot menu. The disadvantage would be that if you have to disconnect the first hard drive, your UEFI firmware will have to be set to legacy booting to boot from the Windows 7 hard drive - and you will have to set your UEFI firmware to boot in legacy mode to install Windows 7 in legacy mode. Legacy mode is another name for BIOS/MBR.

Your 3TB hard drive is set up very well for a clean install. You will want to select the custom install option in Windows 10 Setup, you will get a list of the partitions on the drive. You will want to delete all the partitions before the first data partition. There will probably be 4 of them because I think you will see a hidden MSR (Microsoft System Reserved) partition in there. Then pick the unallocated space that will result at the front of the disk to install to.

That is the recovery partition. Installs of the newer builds of Windows 10 in legacy mode seem to combine the recovery partition and the system partition (the system partition does not contain the Operating System, it contains the boot files). Installs of Windows 10 will always create separate EFI system partition (where the boot files are) and a recovery partition. I can't honestly remember what partitions a clean install of Windows 7 creates.