Windows 7: Using two hard drives with two different operating syatems

Press F8 during post to choose what drive to boot from.

Worked the first time, I hit F8 and had my choice of which drive. I shut down and tried it again it bypassed me while pressing the F8 key and went right into Win 8. I tried it again and the same thing. I unplugged the win 8 drive and rebooted back into win 7.

EasyBcd

Simply add the missing OS into the boot menu.

The OSes can stay where they are and no more cable fiddling.

I just downloaded and will install on my win 7 drive and see what happens thanks

I dont believe BCD will work because of the os on two different hard drives. I installed and natually it will only see one entry in the bootloader because the program is not made to see the other drive.

EasyBCD does indeed work but you need a stable booting OS to install it upon to add the other HD's OS.

However your BIOS should save and boot the choice of HD's, so I would reset BIOS to defaults in case a bad setting is interfering: Clear CMOS - 3 Ways to Clear the CMOS - Reset BIOS

Then boot into BIOS setup to set preferred OS HD to boot first, followed by secondary HD. Make sure you Save the changes using the key given and Exit Saving Changes. Confirm you've done this.

after refreshing drive scan I found my win 8 as G:. I added and rebooted and got the bcd boot memu and pick win 8. I got a message that confirm digatial signature and would let me boot into win 8.

Do you get the Windows 8 Dual Boot graphical GUI? This should have been configured if Win8 was installed last. You can try to add it now by running an Automatic Repair from Win8 System Recovery Options - Boot to in Windows 8.

Set Win8 HD first to boot before doing this.

Sorry for the delay. After messing with BCD and rebooting, as soon as I see my Asus splash screen the win 8 sansung drive option pops up, now if I continue to press F8 I do get the boot menu and I am able to switch between win 8 and win 7. Thanks for the help and the learning trip. As always this forum is top quality and professional,
Bruce

You're most welcome, Bruce. But the selection of first HD to boot should not generate any BIOS menu on its own unless there is a BIOS setting causing this. Normally it should boot into the preferred OS which either has a WIndows-managed Dual Boot menu or boots only via the BIOS.

With Win8 as suggested the preferred method is to let Win8 configure a Dual Boot during install to get the nice Metro-style Dual Boot menu GUI. Auto Repair at boot should configure this if you can get it stably booting to the WIn8 HD every time.