Cannot create a dual boot

I am experiencing a problem that has got me baffled.
I have legal copies of windows7 and windows 8,at the moment windows 7 is installed and i wanted to install windows 8 on a separate drive (i have 5 in the pc) but when i put the disk in it does not give me the option of where to install it will only install on the (C) drive which means i loose windows 7.
I suspect it is a bio's problem but so far have been unable to find it.
I even used Acronis to recover a backup to another drive (E) and it installed but does not show up when i start the PC where earlier i would have the option which choose which copy to boot.

Any ideas please
Bill

 

I guess these five drives are partitions of a single drive rather than physical drives? I think your problem relates to the crazy way Windows sets up a dual boot, always naming the system partition C, and always putting the boot files for both systems into the first partition, which is your Win 7 partition.

I would first try renaming your partitions with short but meaningful names and trying again, as I cannot remember whether the installation process uses only drive letters or also shows drive names, in which case you would be sure which partition you are installing to.

 

No they are not partitions they are physical drives.

I will try re-naming the drives and see if there is any difference.

 

I changed the names and letters of the drives but no luck.

I changed all the drives to "primary" but still no luck.

 

Provided Win 8 is a full retail installation disk, i.e. not an upgrade, I'm not sure what the problem may be, as I've done the same without any issues. However you could try restoring your image (of Win 8?) to an empty primary partition and installing EasyBCD in Win7 and adding it to the EasyBCD boot menu.

It would help if you could post a pic of your disk management Bill.

 

It is a full retail copy (both 7 and 8)
I can not restore a copy of win 8 because at the moment i do not have one as it has not been installed yet.

I can post a pic of anything you need but i am not sure what you mean by "disk management"?

In the pic all the disks are empty because i have transferred all my data and files to an external drive to see if that would help but no luck.

P.S. all my backups are also on external drives.

 

For Disk Management you can do Start > type diskmgmt.msc > Enter. If you can get a pic of both the top and bottom halves of the output that should help. I'll have another think after I've seen it.

 

OK sorry for the misunderstanding.

 

I need to think about this Bill - that's a very non-standard setup you have, with the Win 7 boot files on a different physical drive from the system files. I may be able to help, maybe not, but the guy who definitely could is sach2, but haven't seen him around of late. Maybe a PM asking him if he can take a look?

 

Thanks for looking at this, i am maybe going to do a fresh install of windows 7 and hope it resets everything then i will (if it lets me )install windows 8 on an empty drive and then use a backup to restore my original windows..

I know it is not the most efficient way to do this but i have been trying for 2 days without success so i will try anything now.

I have just had 3 weeks in hospital for some repairs and this has started when i came home and fired up the pc,i do not know how this has happened because during the testing period of win 8 i had a dual boot on the system,i also know that no one has used the pc while i was away so it must be the gremlins :-D

 

Daft as it may sound, given the oodles of drive capacity you have, the simplest way forward would be to partition drive C to provide say 100GB for Win 8. I'm pretty sure that would work without disturbing 7. Be a good idea to take an image of drives 2 and 3 first, just in case.

 

The problem is that i still can not select a partition to load win8,it automatically selects the partition where win 7 is and deletes it

 

It's up to you but until you've tried my suggestion you can't be sure. You might be able to use Win 7 disk management for the partitioning but if not there are good free tools available for this.

 

Yeah, I suggested that in #5 but 8 needs to be installed before EasyBCD can detect it and that's where we are stuck atm.

 

@ earthling
I tried partitioning "C" but the result is the same,it wants to install where win7 is.

Back to the drawing board.

 

OK, here's another suggestion. Use a disk management program such as Minitool Partition Wizard to hide the Win 7 partition and try again. You would need to create or download the PW bootable disk and boot to it to be able to do that.

You might find a read HERE helpful too.

EDIT - I'm intrigued by the 60+GB occupied by your System Reserved partition - it's normally just 100MB.

 

I have to be honest that i have no idea how that was created,at one time i had 3 copies of windows XP:7and 8 installed on the pc and after uninstalling XP and 8 it was as you see it now and at the moment short of a fresh install of 7 i do not know how to get it to revert to the original setup.

I am trying your last suggestion at the moment to see if i can hide the partition.

 

On the assumption that this too will fail I've got my thinking cap on as to how we can do a reinstall of 7 without losing anything.

 

I have managed to get win 8 in dual boot :-D

I tried various combination's of partitioning different HDDs and eventually got a fresh install of win 7 on a separate drive i then loaded win 8 on the same drive and it works:hyper

Thanks for all the help and patience.

 

Well done! For my benefit, what was the position after hiding C?

Anyway, classic case of nil desperandum carburundum :-D

 

I was unable to hide "C", i copied the "system reserve" to the "C" drive and it seems to work but i tried a lot of other things and i can not guarantee which one did the trick.

thanks.