Want to make Win 7 System Partition DualBoot

Still cannot do. Get a message that "this drive is on the same physical disk as your system drive."

Was looking at Bootrec , but none seemed exactly right. Maybe you know better or have thought of something. I fell asleep in the middle of typing this and think I'd better quit for now.

Night Hawk, you are so quick, you posted while I was asleep.

Nothing in the BIOS, in fact it is very, very simple. Can enable virtualization is about it.

This is a second internal hard drive, not an external drive. So good of you to think of all the contengencies, but it doesn't even travel much around my living room. Mostly sits by my recliner while I use fabulous Firefly corded keyboard which shows a light through the character of each key so I can easily type this at night. It can't wake the computer either.

Hope answers helped, migraine is coming on rapidly. Good night for now.

Oops, forgot: Win 7 was booting fine all by itself with the C Vista drive removed after I did the repair install.

Your present boot loader and mbr entries are on the internal C Vista drive there. In order to see the external drive made bootable on it's own you may have to perform an upgrade repair install with the internal unplugged. Once made bootable as a stand alone drive you can install EasyBCD on both Vista and 7 while keeping one as default preferrably Vista being on the internal drive.

Being too late and falling asleep is nothing to rush into here! Get that first and then take a fresh look at things so far on the thread here. That will be the best option for you since that can help in avoiding mistakes along the way.

With the Vista drive added back in with the 7 drive set as default you can now add Vista into the new 7 bcd there for a dual boot while still seeing the 7 drive as a stand alone. The EasyBCD entry will simply point to the Vista boot loader on the other drive.

One thing to note is the drive association option seen in EassyBCD itself. When swapping drives around and drive letters subsequently are changed you can go in and reassign the new drive letter for any OS added into the bcd store in the advanced Settings.

Note the screen presently showing C for the 7 install here. You can see how if a second OS like Vista for example may be on F, G, H, etc where you would simply select the correct drive letter for that installation as set in the 7 Disk Management tool and click the "Save Settings" button to see that set.

(latest build 100 beta in use here)

I've unplugged and replugged the Vista drive back in when running the betas and RCs without ever needing to mark any partitions. EasyBCD was actually installed on both while both drives had seen stand alone installations already from the existing XP/Vista dual boot at the time.

All you needed to do was set the 7 drive as default in the bios once again after replugging the Vista drive then seen as HD0 back in and add a new entry into the then 7 bcd store. If I were to install Vista now on this case on another drive while the 7 was still plugged in Vista would become D as seen by 7.

Once the 7 host drive was unplugged and Vista saw a repair or full install to make that other drive a stand alone and the 7 host was plugged back in Vista would still load when selected. When EasyBCD was installed on Vista and 7 was added in there then seeing the Vista drive set as default 7 would still load as well when selected. Despite both being separate editions they share the same boot loader.

When adding Vista into the 7 bcd while having each on separate drives both were stand alone OS where the loading of Vista when selected would then see the choice at the time to boot into XP or Vista having been the previous dual boot seen in the Vista bcd. The 7 RC was also added into the Vista bcd as another option while each drive remained indepently bootable if run by themselves.

Once the 7 drive is made bootable as a stand alone there the addition of the Vista entry is basic once plugged back keeping the 7 drive set as the default. The second trip into the bios however will be needed since the Vista will still be HD0 and automatically be set as the first default drive once replugged unless data cables are reversed for seeing the 7 drive plugged into port #1 on the board.

The image taken of any drive is strictly what is on the drive itself. For a backup of the 7 drive the added entry for Vista would be preserved while nothing on the Vista drive is included in the drive image unless the drive is also checked off to be included.

With the repair install the 7 should be booting up normally as you would expect it to. When going to add the Vista drive back in especially if that was plugged into the first sata port on the board it will then become the default boot drive in the bios.

To insure the 7 drive is the first default drive and later add an entry in for Vista you can opt to switch the data cables between the drives seeing the 7 drive then plugged into port #1 which makes any further repairs easy being the first drive or simply go into the bios, integrated peripherals, hard drives clicking enter to bring up the list of hard drives installed and move that to the top of the list. Then simply exit and save the new bios setting made.

Once booting by default into 7 you can add the new entry for Vista into 7's own bcd store on that drive using the EasyBCD tool. You will need to sign up at the neosmart forums however to download the latest beta build 100 now seen until the new 2.0 version is final and made public. The old 1.72 was written for Vista and would see the Vista boot screen replace the newer animated 7 boot logo if that is used.

Once the Vista entry is added and you can even name that what you want to be showin in the boot options screen you simply select it to see Vista load rather then 7. You can leave 7 as the default OS or change it to Vista. The amount of time for the boot options screen to be display can be reduced from 30 down even under 5 seconds to speed things up as well.