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Need guidance to dual boot win7/8 in laptop that is the spawn of satan
Hey guys,
Spent (wasted) 3 entire days trying to get something that seemed a no brainer to set up but gradually became some of the most infuriating/frustrating days that I have ever spent on computers
Lenovo W520 (bios 1.34)
i7 2820QM
Win 7 x64 pro (on samsung 650 gb sata drive)
24gb ram (8 x 8 x 4 x 4)
1 x 7200 rpm samsung 650gb hdd
1 x 7200 rpm scorpio black (data drive in ultra bay adaptor)
1 x 240 gb crucial mSATA m500 (win 8.1)
All I wanted was to add in a win 8.1 installation on an msata drive and dual boot with my existing win 7 installation on the spindle hdd. Seemed simple enough. It took me quite a while to figure out that win 8.1 seemed to have severe issues installing on an msata ssd on this laptop whilst there was another bootable drive in there.
I removed the other drives and still faced a lot of problems booting from the msata after the first reboot that windows requires. After much trial and error and googling as well as combining a bunch of solutions
(disabling VT-d, enabling diagnostics at boot up, setting bios to defaults etc), I finally managed to install windows and get it up and running.
Then the second I attached the other drives back into the laptop, and although the laptop booted up, it refused to detect the win 7 drive in windows (it was visible and bootable from bios). It was also nowhere to be found in disk management tools. I made the mistake of trying to re-install win 8 with drives attached. Nothing worked.
I had to repeat the whole aforementioned process again to get 8.1 running on msata.
I then reattached the remaining 2 drives (one in the laptops primary hdd bay, and the other in the optical drive ultra bay). This time I inserted the data drive into the laptops primary hdd bay and the windows 7 drive in the ultra bay.
Although I can see and use the win 7 drive from win 8, I cannot boot windows from an ultrabay adaptor. I am too scared of trying to switch the drives back around in the fear that they will mess up the win 8 installation again.
Is there a fix to this? I would prefer one that did not involve a bios update as the laptops warranty period has ended.
Thanks in advance and for reading this lenghty tale of woe.