Trouble dual booting Windows 10 ... PC keeps restarting.

Neil_Jones

Try the upgrade to see if you can achieve the effect you want, which is two Windows 10 booting side by side.

If it works, then you get what you ask for.  If it doesn't, then you can say you tried.

A clean Windows 7 installation upgraded to 10 (soon as possible, ie don't do any updates or install any drives or anything in 7) may be as clean as you're going to get to achieve your ultimate desired result.

JustAnotherSaver

Neil_Jones said:

Try the upgrade to see if you can achieve the effect you want, which is two Windows 10 booting side by side.

If it works, then you get what you ask for.  If it doesn't, then you can say you tried.

A clean Windows 7 installation upgraded to 10 (soon as possible, ie don't do any updates or install any drives or anything in 7) may be as clean as you're going to get to achieve your ultimate desired result.

How would you do this, as in what's the most likely to work?

Clean install Win 7.

Upgrade Win7 to Win10

Create partition for Win 10.

Install second Win 10

or

Clean install Win7

Clean install Win10 (obviously create a partition in between)

Upgrade Win7 to Win 10

or some other way?

esuhl

JustAnotherSaver said:

I think the key thing (in my eyes) is also that when i changed the default Windows/partition to boot to, the partition that WAS the problem stopped being the problem and the partition that wasn't the problem became the problem if you get me? So it surely can't be a case of Bill's partition is a problem no matter what, because when i make it the default partition instead of not being default, it's no longer a problem.

-----

What do you mean by "default" when you say, "changed the default Windows/partition to boot to" and "make it the default partition"?  Do you just mean selecting which OS to boot in the bootloader, or... something else...?

JustAnotherSaver said:

Not only that but i can't help but think it should be possible. That's not me saying any of you are wrong, far from it. It's just a question of finding out how it can be done.

If it isn't possible, I'll eat my hat!  And email Microsoft to complain!  I'm sure it must be possible.  I've not actually tried with Windows 10, but my experience of other OSes (including Microsoft's) would leave my jaw of the floor if it wasn't something that (in theory) should pose no problems at all.

JustAnotherSaver said:

How would you do this, as in what's the most likely to work?

Clean install Win 7.

Upgrade Win7 to Win10

Create partition for Win 10.

Install second Win 10

or

Clean install Win7

Clean install Win10 (obviously create a partition in between)

Upgrade Win7 to Win 10

or some other way?

If you want to try that, the second option would be the way to go.  If the problem is with two Win10 OSes not working together (which I refuse to believe!) it would make sense to stick with Win7 until you've installed the second (Win10) OS.  And then try the Win7->Win10 upgrade.

Neil_Jones

JustAnotherSaver said:

Neil_Jones said:

Try the upgrade to see if you can achieve the effect you want, which is two Windows 10 booting side by side.

If it works, then you get what you ask for.  If it doesn't, then you can say you tried.

A clean Windows 7 installation upgraded to 10 (soon as possible, ie don't do any updates or install any drives or anything in 7) may be as clean as you're going to get to achieve your ultimate desired result.

How would you do this, as in what's the most likely to work?

Well you've already proved to yourself that 7 and 10 can dual boot happily so get that working first.

Then just upgrade the 7 to 10 and see if you can switch between them happily.

If you can, the problem you posted about is solved and if you can't, well Google's that way -->.

JustAnotherSaver

@esuhl - by default I mean when you get to the dual boot screen, the one that is listed first. Or when you go in to msconfig the one that says “default” next to it under the boot tab. 

@Neil_Jones - I haven’t proved anything yet. I haven’t yet installed 7 alongside 10. The other day I installed 7 on a VM just to check whether a key I had been given years ago by someone on another forum could still be activated (I needed to do phone activation but it worked). I haven’t actually tried to dial boot 7 with 10 yet though. It was too late last night to start. I’ll be trying it out this morning. If it doesn’t work then surely I am doing something terribly wrong. We shall see. 

mksysb

How about installing both windows, then installing linux as a triple boot machine.  The grub bootloader should detect all other o/s and you could select the one you want from the grub menu.

The problems you have do sound like fast boot is on.  Have you double checked in the bios that it really has been turned off?

JustAnotherSaver

mksysb said:

How about installing both windows, then installing linux as a triple boot machine.  The grub bootloader should detect all other o/s and you could select the one you want from the grub menu.

The problems you have do sound like fast boot is on.  Have you double checked in the bios that it really has been turned off?

Regards Linux, i don't really want to mingle it in with Windows. I know many do. I had enough bother as it was installing it on its own SSD without complicating things so i'd prefer to leave it on its own drive away from anything else. I'll be buying a 2.5" enclosure at some point and for whenever i want to use Linux, i'll just connect it and boot direct to that.

As for the fast boot, i only did what was mentioned earlier in the thread - i followed the provided link and turned it off as per the instructions in that link. I haven't done anything with BIOS.

I'll have a look in BIOS to see if i can find anything that says fast boot. For the record my MOBO is an ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 and my BIOS is the latest version (revision 2301).

JustAnotherSaver

Well in a way i'm actually glad that disabling Fast Boot (i think it's called Quick Start in my BIOS?) in BIOS didn't work (just tried it now) because it took forever to boot.

First off that ticking number takes an age to get to 16GB RAM

Then you have to deal with that screen adding time on. By the time it's all done you'd be just as well letting it restart and then eventually boot.

So alls that is left for me to try now is dual booting 7 & 10. I gave it a shot though.

JustAnotherSaver

This is not going well at all.

Trying to install Windows 7 from the USB drive and it keeps asking for CD/DVD drivers, so it wont install.

I made a bootable DVD and it gets stuck at the expanding files part ... stays at 0% and the disc keeps spinning and spinning.

This is going to be a bit of a problem as i only have 2 Windows 7 discs...

1) An old one before SP1 even came out

2) An unattended one that has my own key auto filled out as well as some other tweaks.

JustAnotherSaver

Oh dear. It's 5:20pm already. I feel like i've done absolutely nothing today.

Well i'm glad i didn't just assume Windows 7 would work.

The alarm bells started ringing when Windows 7 wouldn't even install to the disk via either USB or CD. The CD one is what really made me think something is up because that's never failed before, never.

In the end i was able to boot via USB but at first i was getting the error messages still. I had to sort of cancel the install but not restart and then try again, click decline on some things or whatever (i can't even remember now tbh) and then eventually it worked, via a method where it kept failing to work. Yeah, explain that one :-/

So i install Windows 7.

Jump in to disk management, shrink the volume & then restart.

Put the Win10 USB in, install to the newly created partition.

So now they're both installed. Windows 10 is default. I boot to this ... no problem.

Ok so here's the test ... i then try booting to the Windows 7 partition ...... restart and THEN it boots to Windows 7.

This is with 2 partitions on the exact same physical SSD. The only thing i haven't tried is putting them on separate physical disks but really, it shouldn't be a problem should it, so i can't see that sorting it out.

Oh and then i realise that with Windows 7, you don't auto-activate, yet with Windows 10 you seemingly do. So now i'm left wondering/worrying whether i'm going to turn on my Windows 7 machine one day to find that it wont connect to the internet or something because the key is tied to Windows 10.