I did a or what I thought was a dual boot set up on my main machine only to have got it very wrong and it now boots into 8 only.

I have brought my Samsung 1TB 103J Spinpoint out of semi retirement and got it up to date with security etc etc .

However I would like to go back and use the Seagate as it is a 6gbs device and a lot less noisy and a tad faster than the Samsung.

I do not know if should completely format the Seagate shut down take out the Samsung to avoid any more muck ups set the Seagate as the master again reinstall 7 then backup from a system image (did one just before I went awry) and go to the dual boot option when it has been sorted. I'm not worried re the time this will take as it has been my fault all along and will wear that.

I am fairly sure of where I went wrong now with the dual boot option - starting it from within the partition (C) which was running 7 instead of the new partition I created (F) which is why I wasn't getting Brinks tutorial instructions right.

Running the setup.exe in the main folder overwrites the drive C os, run the setup.exe in the sources folder to get a choice of install drive...

Thanks so much you fellows I am sorry to be such a damn nuisance - I'll go ahead format the drive > reinstall the 7 and get all my stuff back from the system image on the external which by sheer chance I had done two days ago. Shouldn't take too long as I have it on a 3.0 USB drive.

Then get that dual boot into the created partition - done from the USB stick with the 8 preview I downloaded it onto last night. Jeez won't be so quick off the mark again will I??

Again thanks to you both it has taken a load off my mind - not being too savvy myself.

John

John, before you start on the dual book, you need to get the extended partitions right. So you have reformat C: as Basic and NTFS disk (good), and it's now one large HDD (good). Install Windows 7 from scratch on C: (good). Where are you at now?

Hiyaa aem at last I have my machine back have just this second got the OK 9:34pm (started 5:30pm)
Took a lot of fiddling around on top of the reinstall but after two attempts went to the tutorial and it's worked

Don't know why but the machine kept on telling me that it would be faster through the 3.0USB ports but then it couldn't find them for the back up so did it through the 2.0 one.

Cooey aint going to be so out of the gate so quick again - hells bells that was some experience seeing the first two backups come to not much.

THanks to you and everyone else again

Now for the dual boot try out and yeah I'll be taking it REAL slow

Yes mate aint going down that path again its going into the small extra partition and run from there too