# Dual Boot Missing!



## Paragone (Aug 8, 2011)

So I got W8 Pro x64. Installed it over my old Vista partition on the HDD. Everything went horribly wrong the first time around. The partition wouldn't boot and gave me some weird messages about having an issue, then immediately restarts. 

Ok, forget that, let's just get a game of SC2 on my SSD. Boot into SSD (W7 x64) and the W8 boot manager showed up (which I forgot to detach before installing W8). Fixed that in msconfig. 

Then tried booting into my W7 x64 partition on the HDD, and it gives me an error like the first time I tried booting the W8 partition: "Some error that we won't give you time to note!" Alright then things got dicey. 

Formatted the W8 partition and kept it a clean slate. Disconnected HDD cables from motherboard. Tried booting into SSD. Windows 8 boot manager pops up again. Fixed in msconfig.

Tried to boot into W7 partition on HDD. BOOTMGR IS MISSING, PRESS CTRL+ALT+DLT to restart. Went ahead and inserted W7 disc to try and repair PC. Start-Up repair says its done. Restarted and same error. Tried booting back to SSD to get help. OS's that were missing on my HDD pop up on my SSD. Now I'm confused. Tried booting the HDD's W7, BSOD (neither AHCI nor IDE worked). Deleted them all except for System Default in msconfig. SSD boots fine now. Tried booting back to W7 on HDD. Same error. 

Reinstalled W8 because I was out of ideas. Worked. Now W8 is running flawlessly. Problem is I cannot access my W7 partition. It doesn't show up anywhere and I don't know how to get it to. All my files are stored there but luckily enough they were not corrupted. I can access them in W8. I just cannot boot into W7 to do the same. Help!


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## Paragone (Aug 8, 2011)

Update: Ran Windows Update on the W8 and installed them. Tried to manually add OS to legacy boot manager via CMD. Set W7 partition to active in Disc Management. Now the entire HDD just gives me the NO BOOTMGR error. Tried inserting the W8 repair disc, it doesn't even show the option of "Exit and continue to Windows x" anymore. Neither do the OS's even show up in the wizard. When I tried using System Restore, it reported that I must first select and OS to load the restore points from. It seems like the OS's are not reporting they are even there. :sad:


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## djaburg (May 15, 2008)

To fix your windows 7 installation, I'd only have your windows 7 disk plugged in, then boot from windows 7 disk, and use this utility. That should get windows 7 running properly. It sounds like Windows 8 altered your MBR (Master Boot Record). Normally when you install an OS to a computer that already has an OS installed, you should have an option to replace, upgrade, or dual boot. Not sure if you did and if so, what option you selected.


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## Paragone (Aug 8, 2011)

My HDD has 4 partitions, 2 of which are irrelevant. The other 2 are W7 and (now) W8. I formatted the partition I was going to install W8 on, which had WVista. I recall that when W8 first installed, it did show me the W8 boot menu, which had the dual boots for my OS's. When I tried the options though, I got errors on both. That leads us to the first paragraph. I'll get on Bootrec when I get home, thanks for advice.


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## djaburg (May 15, 2008)

What likely happened then is that the boot record for the computer was contained in the windows vista partition and formatting it removed it thereby removing reference to windows 7. Hopefully one of two things will happen, the utility will get the boot record setup correctly the first time recognizing both OS's, or once configured for Windows 8, the boot record can be altered to show windows 7 installation.


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