I have a Laptop with a 120GB Solid State Drive. My primary operating system has been Windows 7 Ultimate. Recently I decided to try and Install Windows 8 Pro Along side windows 7 . Dual Boot. I read about Dual Booting in this Official Windows 8 Magazine and it seemed easy. I ran into a few problems:
1. I was able to 'shrink Volume' to create another partition of atleast the 20GB minimum required for windows 8. I did 25GB's because my 120gb solid state drive was almost full with other windows 7 files and partitions. The problem I ran into was in creating a 'New Simple Volume' and formatting my new 25GB's of space. An Error message saying "not enough memory or space available to perform operation" kept popping up.
Am I getting these error messages because I already have 4 different partitions on my drive? The different partitions were A: Windows 7 OS and Files, B: Windows 7 Hibernation, C: Windows 7 Recovery and D: an unknown 8gb primary partition
2. I decided to delete the Windows 7 Recovery partition, because I have my Windows 7 DVD, and I didn't mind re-installing everything if I were to mess up. Plus my OS doesn't run from that partition, and I'll have room to create my new Windows 8 simple volume. (probably a dumb decision)
3. Disk management didn't want to delete my Recovery partition (probably for good reason) and merge it's free space with my 25GB' partition that I had previously created and was unable to create the New simple volume in. I had to use a 3rd party program called Paragon Partition Manager free edition to do this. I had to restart my laptop for Paragon to delete the 2GB recovery partiton and merge the space with my un-formatted 25GB partition. After the Paragon program finished, my laptop wouldn't boot windows 7 and just hung up with an Intel boot agent screen.
4. Luckily, I had already made my Windows 8 bootable flash drive to Install the OS. Since Windows 7 wasn't booting, I decided to go ahead and try to install windows 8 with my flash drive. It worked! I found my 27GB partition in the setup menu, was able to format it, and install Windows 8. Now windows 8 starts up! My other partition with windows 7 also shows up in Disk management and In my computer!.
5. My biggest question is, How can I make that Windows 8 Dual boot screen pop up when I turn on my laptop??
I can boot into windows 7 if I go to Disk Management in Windows 8, Right click my windows 7 partition, and click "Make Active partition". I then hit restart, and my laptop boots to Windows 7 no problem. I Can boot into windows 8 by doing the same Thing in Disk Management in Windows 7. "Make Active Partition" and restart Pc.
So in a sense, I have what I want; Windows 7 and Windows 8. But, I shouldn't have to go into Disk Management each time I want to change the system Im using. Can someone please tell me how to get the Windows 8 Dual Boot option at startup? Thanks
1. I was able to 'shrink Volume' to create another partition of atleast the 20GB minimum required for windows 8. I did 25GB's because my 120gb solid state drive was almost full with other windows 7 files and partitions. The problem I ran into was in creating a 'New Simple Volume' and formatting my new 25GB's of space. An Error message saying "not enough memory or space available to perform operation" kept popping up.
Am I getting these error messages because I already have 4 different partitions on my drive? The different partitions were A: Windows 7 OS and Files, B: Windows 7 Hibernation, C: Windows 7 Recovery and D: an unknown 8gb primary partition
2. I decided to delete the Windows 7 Recovery partition, because I have my Windows 7 DVD, and I didn't mind re-installing everything if I were to mess up. Plus my OS doesn't run from that partition, and I'll have room to create my new Windows 8 simple volume. (probably a dumb decision)
3. Disk management didn't want to delete my Recovery partition (probably for good reason) and merge it's free space with my 25GB' partition that I had previously created and was unable to create the New simple volume in. I had to use a 3rd party program called Paragon Partition Manager free edition to do this. I had to restart my laptop for Paragon to delete the 2GB recovery partiton and merge the space with my un-formatted 25GB partition. After the Paragon program finished, my laptop wouldn't boot windows 7 and just hung up with an Intel boot agent screen.
4. Luckily, I had already made my Windows 8 bootable flash drive to Install the OS. Since Windows 7 wasn't booting, I decided to go ahead and try to install windows 8 with my flash drive. It worked! I found my 27GB partition in the setup menu, was able to format it, and install Windows 8. Now windows 8 starts up! My other partition with windows 7 also shows up in Disk management and In my computer!.
5. My biggest question is, How can I make that Windows 8 Dual boot screen pop up when I turn on my laptop??
I can boot into windows 7 if I go to Disk Management in Windows 8, Right click my windows 7 partition, and click "Make Active partition". I then hit restart, and my laptop boots to Windows 7 no problem. I Can boot into windows 8 by doing the same Thing in Disk Management in Windows 7. "Make Active Partition" and restart Pc.
So in a sense, I have what I want; Windows 7 and Windows 8. But, I shouldn't have to go into Disk Management each time I want to change the system Im using. Can someone please tell me how to get the Windows 8 Dual Boot option at startup? Thanks
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 7 Ultimate / Windows 8 Pro
- System Manufacturer/Model
- Toshiba Portege Z835-P330
- CPU
- i3-2367m
- Memory
- 4GB ddr3
- Hard Drives
- 120GB SSD