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Cannot boot Win7 RC from Vista boot manager.
Hello All,
I'm having a heck of a time trying to figure this one out so I came here for help.
Background:
I had a dual boot system with XP Pro and Vista Ultimate 32bit everything was great.
I decided to try the Win7 RC but I needed a new drive due to lack of space.
My original drive is IDE, I bought a SATA drive and moved the OS's to the new drive.
I wanted to keep the old drive in system for storage so I formatted it and changed BIOS boot priority.
After fixing some minor issues with drive letter assignments due to the fact the bios reads the first and second IDE channels first then SATA.
I was all ready to install Win7 RC on an unallocated 100gb section of my new drive.
Note: that the old drive has a single partition formatted NTFS but is currently blank.
And I did follow the "Golden Rule" of installing the oldest OS first when I set up the computer in the first place.
The Install went fine.
Now for the problem.
Win7 did not add an entry into Vista's boot manager so no option to boot into Win7 without the install disk in the drive.
I used EasyBCD 1.7.2 from within Vista to add an entry for Win7. But when initially added easyBCD assigns the drive partition a drive letter that I don't have.
Therefore the entry does not show up on reboot. I changed the path to the correct drive and then the entry does show up on reboot.
But when I select Win7 the boot manager refuses to load Win7 saying that "cannot verify the digital signature of the file winload.exe"
I have tried wiping and re-installing the Win7 partition 3 times I've tried using the Win7 install disk to repair startup problems.
None of these has worked I'm at a loss as to what is happening.
If Win7 created a hidden partition for recovery and boot files I'm unable to find it, I thought of trying and Linux Live CD to look for the hidden partition but have not done it yet. My thought was to delete this hidden partition and wipe the Win7 partition and format it before re-installing either from within Vista or during the Win7 install process via a command prompt in an attempt to keep Win7 from creating this hidden partition. The problem is that I don't believe this will solve the problem due to the digital signature error reported by Vista's boot manager.
Can anybody help me with this or at least bring a perspective that I may be over-looking?
Thanks in advance,
DarthLinux