Windows 7: dual boot VISTA/Win 7 does not work

My PC has VISTA home premium x64 installed. After purchasing Win 7 Pro I decided not to upgrade VISTA, rather dual boot for now.

Installing Windows 7 onto a clean HDD I can boot directly to it and can select which drive to boot from via the F12 key at boot up

I installed easyBCD onto the VISTA OS with the expectation that VISTA would be the default OS to boot and Win 7 would be a selectable option.



I get the selection menu when I boot with a 10sec pause and VISTA then boots OK

If I select the Windows 7 option in the menu I get

FILE windows\system32\winload.exe

STATUS 0xc0000428

Windows cannot verify the digital signature of this file.

Any ideas?

Can you attach a copy of your disk management window using the snipping tool in Win 7?

It all depends which drive was primary when you installed the other operating system. If you installed Win 7 on a separate drive without changing the drive order in the bios, the boot files for Win 7 may be on the Vista drive. The picture will help clarify that.

EasyBCD should be able to set it up for you, but if not you might join their forum and download EasyBCD 2.0 beta, which seems to work better in Win 7.

I do not know exactly what F12 does.

Richdave, welcome to SevenForums
Have you tried running startup repair from the Windows 7 dvd? Run at least 3 times to fix some problems. Good luck to you.

Startup Repair

You had the dual boot configured in the best possible way, via the BIOS where the HD's remain independent and can come and go as you please.

Configuring a Windows-managed dual boot instead makes the HD's interdependent and harder to extricate.

Please post back a screenshot of your full Disk Management map, using the Snipping Tool in Start Menu and attaching file using paper clip in reply box.

As Saltgrass noted, you'll need the automated beta of EasyBCD to correct the failed dual boot, so please do the quick registration to use beta and post back also a screenshot of its listings so we can advise you: http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=642

here are the disk management snips...

I had VISTA installed on mt 1TB drive, removed 1TB drive and installed clean 160G drive and format/install Windows 7. Boots/runs OK.

reinstall 1TB drive and set at first boot drive.

F12 opens the boot order util that allows selection of which HDD to boot from.

I can select/boot from either my 1TB (VISTA) or the 16oG (Windows 7) drive this way.

Wanting to make it easy I installed BCD onto the VISTA drive and I cannot get the Windows 7 drive to boot when selected in the boot menu created by BCD.

I have posted over there at NeoSmart forums but no answer there so thought I'd see if someone here had ideas...

I dont have to use BCD but as I will have a MAC OS (Snow leopard) HDD shortly and possibly a Ubuntu HDD in the future I thought it might be a clean way to multi boot my system.

In Disk Management, assign a drive letter to the 100mb System Reserved boot partition for Windows 7.

Install EasyBCD 2.0 beta, remove any listing given for Windows 7, then Add Windows 7 on the Add/Remove tab by Name, Type and drive letter, which it should autocomplete.

Then highlight the new Windows 7 listing above and Save.

It may be necessary to restart Windows 7 to run EasyBCD from there. This is done by booting the Windows 7 DVD Repair console, clicking through to Startup Repair and running up to 3 separate times with reboots.

If there are any further problems, post back here the listings screen from EasyBCD.

thanks gregrocker for the super fast reply.

I have BCD 2.0 Beta installed so will do as suggested and post back... will be a couple hours though as I am at work for a little while yet...

Boot into 7, open an elevated command and type:

bcdboot c:\windows /s e:

press enter.Close comand prompt.

That's it.

Si, just curious: Is the only way Easy would configure this correctly is to give 100mb a drive letter?

Would it then auto-complete Adding 7 using 2.0 from Vista?

The fix is in my post . Nothing else required. 100 mb partition isn't relevant to the original question - giving it a letter would make no difference.