Cannot dual-boot windows 7 on 1tb SSHD

[Ghitorni]

Hello
Till date I always had Win 7 in 32 & 64 bit flavors and occasionally also xp.

Recently I got a 1 tb seagate firecuda and installed win 7 64 bit. However, the 2nd install of the same flavor was awkward (in the first install, after expanding files windows rebooted) because it completed all tasks before rebooting.

However, when I tried booting from the newer install, I saw the dreaded message "cannot load winload.exe"

I deleted that install and tried with 32 bit, same result.

Tried Xp too, same result.

I even deleted all installs and had 32 bit first, then 64 bit, same result.

Currently I am using the 32 bit and typing from there.

Is this how SSHD supposed to behave? I thought the 7gb cache would speed up things, but never expected this.

What may be wrong, any idea? Thanks in advance for any inputs

 

[townsbg]

Are you putting the installs on the same partition or separate? You really need separate partitions for each OS. Do you have a second hard drive in that computer? If so I recommend a clean install and have the power disconnected from the second hard drive during the installs.

 

[Ghitorni]

Different partitions

As a routine I created 4 partitions and after using the first partition, installed on another.

Using another disk does not serve because the cache-benefit for which I purchased the disk, will be nulled.

 

[Snick]

You could try installing the 2nd OS on a different HDD or SSD, External HDD or SSD, make an image then restore it to the new drive on the partition of your choice. Several backup programs allow you to Image only your data, and restore to smaller drive or partition in your case. Get you around the error.