Windows 10: Triple Booting

Hi, just joined forum. I've been on vista and seven forums awhile. I have a PC with three drives. One has Vista (my favorite OS - I'm one of those retro types); the other two have seven. (all home premium). The original drive has seven HP 64, and the drive has a minor issue in that it takes 5 or more minutes to shut down. (It was 15 minutes, I made some progress with it). The other seven drive also has seven HP 64 and works flawlessly. I plan to keep the vista drive going as it's my workhorse. So, I'm wondering which seven drive to install W10 on. My thought is that by installing it on the drive that has the issue, that problem will go away as I will have a new OS. however, I don't want to lose the programs and documents on that drive. So I thought maybe I should install W10 on the other drive, see if it works out, and if so, then install it on the other drive. Sound like a good plan?

Other questions: could I roll back to seven on one of the drives, so I have vista, seven and ten all on my computer? Also, what if I put Linux on one of the drives? Will that mess things up?

Thanks,

michael

:)

 

Triple Booting

Sounds like too much effort. Hopefully the OS's will have an automated option that will partition it for me etc...lol. Now to just wait for MeeGo...

 

Triple Booting

Just a thought, as I now have NitDROID on my phone now, on my 8GB SD Card. Is it possible to have more than 1 extra OS with which to boot up with? If so, how do you go about it, as all I have read about is that installing "X" OS will wipe the SD card,
and I don't want that.



I'm thinking of just looking at the current release of MeeGo that's out there (and yes, I know it's far from complete - I just want to see how it looks in my hands), without losing Android.



Any ideas? Has anyone managed it? Is it really worth trying now, as I'm expecting MeeGo any day no?

 

Why do you think the problem will go away with a new OS. Maybe the drive is going bad. First thing I would do is to backup anything on the drive that is important.

Are you just interested in "playing around" with the various OSs? Working with and maintaining three or four operating systems seems like more pain than I would care to tolerate.

IMO, Vista is one of the worse (its the "Jar Jar Binks" of the Microsoft family). *Tongue I would make the Win7 the workhorse and play around with 10 (until you decide if it is stable and better or worse than 7). Use the third drive just for backups, and put an image of each of the other two drives/OSs on it.

 

If you have the hardware to run it Vista is fine if it has had all the updates. I would liken it more to C-3PO than Jar Jar Binks! It was so correct at enforcing EAC that I couldn't stand it! It was very pretty, compared to XP, which made it worse - I just wasn't ready for a strict nanny!

It doesn't sound like the drive at fault with slow shutdown times, but the Windows 7 installation, as you say, it will improve with a new installation. Find a program that will do a S.M.A.R.T. analysis on your disks to check their Health - Speedfan by Almico is one such program.

As long as you have space on your Hard disk, you can run one or more of many Linux versions with an installer under Windows which means that you don't have to do repartitioning - the Linux installation just chainloads onto your Windows bootloader. The installations just live in folders on your windows drive. I have 3 - Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Puppy, as well as Windows 8.1, Windows 10 insider, and Windows XP pro. They run pretty much as fast as native installations.

 

Country, thanks for the reply. You bring up a good point about the drive maybe being bad. At one point, it was bad - I ran WD diagnostics and it failed. But then I did maintenance on it and it now is fine except for the slow shutdown. Plus, it now passes all the WD diagnostics, even the extended test that takes hours. Still, I'm concerned that it could still be bad, as it is at least 6 years old.

Fafhrd: Thanks for the info on Linux. Maybe I will just leave that drive as is, and do as you say and mess around with Linux on it. I did that once however, and wiped out Windows, so I'll have to be more careful this time around.
I

 

No reason to believe that this will work -- any existing hardware failures on the drive will plague any new installation.

As for drives failing, I had a WD drive fail me suddenly last year. It was only a few months old. One day it worked fine and passed all the WD diags with flying colors. The next day, it was dead and would not work with any data recovery apps. Not bashing WD per se, just saying that an HDD can fail at any time, without any warning.

Not really, not anymore. There used to be WUBI (Windows Ubuntu Installer) and, in the Linux Mint world, Mint4Win (which was based on WUBI), but support for Wubi ended with Ubuntu 12.04 -- which is three years old now, and the Ubuntu forums strongly discourage its use. Furthermore, it won't work with GPT or UEFI -- which tend to be how new machines are configured.

 

My thinking too, Mark. I tried to install the Get Windows app on the drive, but it was not in the updates selected by Win update. In fact, for awhile now, certain updates will not install on that drive, and I'm thinking that is the reason I can't get the GW app - windows is not finding my computer to be ready for it. more indications the drive is bad. So I will copy any documents to another drive, and then that drive will be my "fun with Linux" drive. Until it dies.

 

I don't know where you get your information, but I have just downloaded Ubuntu Mate x86 15.04 iso, and here's the file list, the Autorun.inf file and the wubi installer ready to get to work.:



Clearly WUBI is alive and well in Ubuntu (even though the Ubuntu developers are using WUBI labelled 14.10 from the previous release of Ubuntu!). Ubuntu purists and fanbois hate anything Windows, and shout loud in their own forums, it does not mean they are right.

LinuxMint has Mint4Win, which was included up to ver 15 (Olivia), I believe, but is now not available for the newest versions 17 (Quiana) and 17.1 (Rebecca). Once you have your Ver 15 installed, it is possible to upgrade in place, but Linux is not like Windows, so a version upgrade will not show tremendous differences. Mint has clearly been worried by the setup of newer PCs. GPT and UEFI do not figure in the original poster's setup of Windows 7 and Vista.

I would not suggest anyone with an OEM install of Windows 8 should try to install Linux in this way.

I would also suggest again that a third party S.M.A.R.T. analysis of the installed disks is performed in order to find out if and in which areas the disk(s) may be failing. It is hard to be sure, but otherwise the slow disk problems may just be due to hidden file system problems such as overly large journal files or simple fragmentation issues that grow with "mature" installations. Sometimes these problems can be solved by imaging the system drives, deleting the system and boot partitions and then reapplying the image and rebuilding the BCD.

The Get Windows problems are unlikely to be because the drive is bad, but because your windows update queue has become blocked by some failed update. There are specific fixes for this and would be best followed up in Sevenforums Updates section.

 

Okay, I will do some disk analysis. there does appear to be something wrong with the boot drive, because this drive will only boot off of the Vista drive. A little more history: I did reimage this drive several months ago in an attempt to solve the problem. I used Macrium because Windows could not find the system image. I tried to rebuild the boot partition but to no avail. I guess that is why it will only boot from the Vista drive.

Anyway, I'll run some third-party tests.

 

I look forward to seeing the results!

 

OK, here are the results using CrystalDisk:

vista drive (Seagate): Good - temp=36
seven drive (WD): Caution - temp=38 - reallocated sectors count=184 (current and worst); threshold=140
seven drive (WD): Bad = temp=43 - reallocated sectors count=64 (current and worst); threshold=140

I should note that I just have the "bad" drive sitting in the spare bay under the DVD drive. I have a feeling this is not good (although the drive had problems long before I put it there).

I opened the door of the drive bay to give it some air, temp has come down to 39.

 

Update: I successfully installed Zorin on the Bad Drive, alongside Windows. It installed perfectly, and did not affect Windows. In the process, I was able to solve the boot problem I was having with W7 on that drive. I had tried to repair it previously by inserting the W7 disk when prompted, but it never worked. I realized that if the drive would only boot from the vista drive, then the missing info must be in vista. Maybe because the machine came with vista installed? And W7 was an upgrade version. Anyway, this time, I attempted to repair it by inserting the vista disk, and it made the repair. So now, it boots off the drive it's actually on, instead of the vista drive. The weird thing is that when it starts W7, I first get the vista startup logo, as if vista is going to start. Then W7 starts. But it works. However, it still takes a long time to shut down, and comes up as BAD in Crystaldisk. Tomorrow I will see if it will install the windows updates that have been failing to install. Or, should I just call it good at this point, not push my luck?

 

I think you are doing OK - the Vista BCD is being used, I think because it preexisted the 7 installs. The graphical BCD bootmenu of Windows 8 and 10 actually reboots when a different version from the default in the bootmenu is selected. The whole boot process is like a separate mini OS that serves to get the main (selected) OS to load.

About the long shutdown time - is the pagefile being cleared at shutdown? This generally is not necessary unless you are concerned that remnants of the last session may be a security risk. There is a registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
Value Name: ClearPageFileAtShutdown
Value Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1

If the value is changed to 0, then the pagefile will be left alone. see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/314834

If you have sufficient free disk space you could try Imaging your Windows 7 installation, cleaning the partition and then reapplying the image.
Windows 10 - Setup and Run on USB Flash Drive - Page 2 - Windows 10 Forums for a link to get the WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit) tools (essentially Imagex.exe - see the main part of the same tutorial) without a big download. The imaging process strips Windows down to all the basic OS files, the registry, plus your programs and documents but dumps all the big files that can be recreated, like recycle bin, pagefile, hiberfile and restore points, as well as the hidden filesystem journals etc.

Finally, check your disks weekly to make sure there is no progression in the number of reallocated sectors. If the number is growing, the disk will fail sooner rather than later. If the number is steady, then the reallocations are just due to the disk firmware doing its job properly.

 

Thanks for all that great info, Fafhrd. To update the situation:
I decided to reinstall Windows (as an "Upgrade" so as to preserve my files). This was successful. I really thought doing this would solve the shutdown problem, as well as the update problem re: Microsoft.net framework updates. It did not, still had very slow (10 minutes!) shut down, and the updates would not install (although all others did). I figured then the problem must be with the drive. But the drive is actually stable, the reallocated sectors count doesn't change. So, I did some research. I wondered if the microsoft.net updates were the culprit. I tried repairs to no avail. Then I found something that said that this problem won't go away once you have it, and recommended uninstalling microsoft.net framework 4. So I did. Immediately, the computer began to shut down normally. I hid all the updates for it, and resumed other updates, eventually getting IE 11 so I'm pretty up to date. So, the culprit for the computer shut down issue, which has plagued this drive for years, was microsoft.net framework. With it gone, the computer (i.e. this particular drive) shuts down normally for the first time in years. I'm going to image it when it's all updated.
Now, the only question is, will it be Windows 10 ready? I did install the Get Windows update (KB3035585), but as of yet I don't have the little thingy on my desktop, although it did install successfully. The other thing I wonder about is, should I be worried that I don't have microsoft.net framework?