Solved Set up a dual boot menu on start?

[paulkruger]

I have a system Win 7 Home. Needed to upgrade ram so had to install Ultimate. But put that on separate SSD drive leaving original 7 Home intact just in case.

System always boots to 7 Home. Cannot seem to make any BIOS setting work. The options in setup boot menu don't allow me to move either SATA drive up in the menu. My top options are UEFI boot manager which only starts 7 Home or DVD . USB etc.

In order to boot to the Ultimate I have to log in to boot menu, scroll down to the SATA1 entry and click that.

There should be a means to have a menu automatically presented on boot so I can choose which version of Windows I want to boot?

Is there a native menu that can be activated or should I use something like GRUB?

This is a Formosa MoBo, Z75 Intel chip set. Came from an HP Envy and now lives in a salvaged Pavilion case.

Having to go through all that hassle to boot is a pain. I'm sure once I've gotten all programs installed I may just wipe the original Win 7 install but then not sure if it will automatically boot to Ultimate or if I will have to do the same F9 routine all the time.

 

[Megahertz07]

If I understood, you want to install Win 7 ultimate on a SSD and have win 7 on another disk.
If you want to have Win 7 ultimate on same disk, let us know.

 

[AddRAM]

Does the Bios have a Secure Boot option ?

Log into a menu, what menu ? The only menu you ever need to bring up is the boot menu (not the Bios ) from the boot menu you simply choose which OS you want to run.

Does the W7 Home Premium drive have Ubuntu on it ?

There should be no reason why you can`t go into the Bios and set the W7 Ultimate drive as 1st in the boot order.

List Ultimate as 1st, Hope Premium as 2nd, and your dvd drive as 3rd. Then Save changes and exit the Bios.

If you installed Ultimate while the Home drive was unplugged and you want a boot menu, just install EasyBCD to create it.

EasyBCD - NeoSmart Technologies

 

[paulkruger]

Follow up partially solved.

I did the install of Ultimate but had no simple option to choose which OS to use on boot. Had to go to boot menu choose the specific drive etc.

I decided to experiment since I was not that concerned about losing the old Win7 so I renamed that folder from "windows" to "windows7" which of course confused poor windows and it started a recovery.

After the recovery did it's thing I am no presented with a "pre-boot" option to choose which OS. Fine so far.

But then when I booted to the old 7 it booted okay. had my desktop but could not view any drives or network etc. Went back to Ultimate and renamed the folder back to original and that boots but still no access to "Computer" or network. It says I can "repair" but since the last "repair" touched both os versions I am not going to do that for now.

Decided to set up Ultimate, sacrifice programs and desktop on the Home Premium boot and then just remove the second OS since Ultimate install seems to work fine, I really need only the one OS unless I put Linux in the space where the 7 Home is now.

Were a few minor glitches. After the install and "repair" Ultimate could not see the existance of the DVD. In fact it stopped appearing in the boot menu as well even though I successfully used that to install Ultimate? Go figure. I just unplugged and moved to a different SATA port and rebooted and a driver was automatically installed.

** The only part of this process not done that I would appreciate feedback on is the removal of the old Windows install such that I am not still presented with a boot option.

Once everything I want is removed from the original "C" drive can I just reformat or at least just delete the windows folder it and will Ultimate simply boot normally as if there were no second OS?

Thanks

 

[Megahertz07]

Lets start from the beginning.
You have two kinds of boot loaders under Windows as the drive can be GPT-UEFI or MBR-Legacy.
Please open disk manager, expand the columns so we can read them and take a snapshot of the full window.
Post here as an attachment.
Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image - Windows 7 Help Forums

 

[paulkruger]

I got dual boot to work as explained above but decided it would be a waste of time to keep both versions. I used msconfig / boot and set the Ultimate as default, 10 second delay and deleted the old entry for Win7. Then put all the old win7 stuff in a folder to go through later in case I need something.

Now working just fine.