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Creating a multiboot (both Windows 7)
Hi. Following advice from this forum I moved my bootmgr to the C drive from the System Reserved partition, using EasyBCD. Total disaster - Windows now takes four minutes to boot instead of 20 seconds or so - even though I have moved the bootmgr back to the System Reserved partition. Even when I restore an image I made of the O/S before I made the change, the boot time remains ridiculously long.
I have spent days Googling this, trying to create boot traces and the like (no success so far - they fail 'waiting for prefetcher') and I am into the horrible cycle of troubleshooting, not the original problem, but why my troubleshooting steps aren't working! I could scream...
Well, given that that wouldn't help matters, before I do a full Windows repair, or finally a complete reinstall, I would try adding another Windows 7 (x64) to the same physical disc (an SSD), different partition, to check that a clean installation boots normally. If it doesn't then I presumably have hardware problems - although this seems unlikely as the problem started when I moved the bootmgr, so for now I am sticking with it being a software problem.
Could someone please advise the best way of creating a multiboot - both Win7 x64? I have done this years ago, creating an Windows XP/Millennium dual boot, but obviously things have moved on. I could temporarily delete the data from my 'X' partition (see screenshot below) - I have all the folders backed up - and install the 2nd. instance of Windows 7 there?
How does Win7 work when you boot with two O/Ss? With no boot.ini file, are you presented with a similar screen to XP at startup, with a choice of O/S?
Any help appreciated - I don't want to make a bad situation worse - and I certainly don't want to reinstall my primary O/S only to discover boot times are still very slow. Need to do a test like this first..
Thanks,
Martin