Rearranged dual boot badly

paramaibo · 30 Jan 2015

My Win 7 64 was working perfectly with a dormant 32bit partition that didn't boot.

I used a dual boot utility, altered some settings and ended up locking myself out entirely.

With the help of an installation disk, I now find myself on the old 32 partition with the 64 bit renamed with a new drive letter.

Ideally, I would like the 64bit as primary (default) boot partition & 32bit partition below it on the initial boot screen. However, I'll settle for just the 64bit.

Changing the 64bit partition letter back to C would not be an instant panacea, I fear, or would it?

East BCD came to my rescue and is the magic wand that I wanted!

whs · 30 Jan 2015

The running OS partition is always C. You cannot change just any partition to be C. When your 64bit system will run, it will be C - but not when you run the 32bit system.

gregrocker · 30 Jan 2015

Please post back a screenshot of Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image.
More than half the time these are incorrectly configured.

Why would you want 32 bit OS in Dual Boot if it cannot boot? Do you wish to repair it? Or will it merely not boot?

paramaibo · 31 Jan 2015

I had 2 disks; one SSD with 64 & cloned 32bit (that wouldn't boot) partitions & a 2nd HDD with a properly booting 32 bit partition, thus I could dual boot when the need arose. Due to this inefficiency, I decided to remove the 2nd drive & replace it with an identical HDD with cloned partitions lacking any OS & tried to get the 2 SSD partitions working properly.

This was where my problems started because I fiddled with Dual Boot Repair & Visual BCD Editor & effectively locked myself out totally (black screen with instruction to insert disk). I did this & managed to boot into 32bit & posted the OP.

It was then that I searched the site and came across Easy BCD and sorted everything out to exactly my requirements. I have even managed to edit the entries on the boot screen to display 64 bit & 32 bit (previously there were two choices called Windows 7) and I learnt that the top default choice was fortuitously 64 bit. However, I now have 3 options displaying: 64 and 2 x 32 bit below it and I have tried to delete one but it doesn't appear on Easy BCD so that I can delete it, but I can live with that :)

I hope this may help anyone who finds themselves in a similar position.