Hi
I have a nice work laptop which runs a custom Windows 8 image. The machine has an enormous hard drive, and it struck me that it would be really good if I could dual boot it with a 'personal' image so that I can have my own applications, internet etc on it.
The laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad and it has a UEFI bios and I've not used these before. The drive is divided up into various partitions, including system, recovery and 'OEM'. It also has a small SSD (16GB) although I'm not sure what this is for, and it is also labelled as 'OEM'. I tried shrinking down the main primary partition to give me a decent amount of space and then installed Windows 8.1 on to it using a USB stick. From the reading I had done, it seemed that all I would need to do is install it and it would automatically set up a dual boot.
Everything seemed to go OK and sure enough I got the dual boot screen come up. It would boot my new Windows perfectly but when I tried to boot the work installation it didn't load - it tried to do an 'automatic repair' which failed. Looking at the partitions in diskpart showed it as simply a 'RAW' partition. This was a bit of a problem as I now couldn't boot my work image at all!
After some playing around in the BIOS I found that the boot order had 'Windows Boot Manager' first and the hard drive itself listed second. If I changed the order so that the hard drive was first, I could then boot the work image but when I looked in the disk management screen my new installation showed as a 'RAW' partition!
So somehow the boot order seems to be causing one or other of the primary partitions to become unreadable which is presumably why it won't boot. I don't want to break the work image if I can help it... but I'd love the dual boot to work.
Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening and what to do about it?
James
I have a nice work laptop which runs a custom Windows 8 image. The machine has an enormous hard drive, and it struck me that it would be really good if I could dual boot it with a 'personal' image so that I can have my own applications, internet etc on it.
The laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad and it has a UEFI bios and I've not used these before. The drive is divided up into various partitions, including system, recovery and 'OEM'. It also has a small SSD (16GB) although I'm not sure what this is for, and it is also labelled as 'OEM'. I tried shrinking down the main primary partition to give me a decent amount of space and then installed Windows 8.1 on to it using a USB stick. From the reading I had done, it seemed that all I would need to do is install it and it would automatically set up a dual boot.
Everything seemed to go OK and sure enough I got the dual boot screen come up. It would boot my new Windows perfectly but when I tried to boot the work installation it didn't load - it tried to do an 'automatic repair' which failed. Looking at the partitions in diskpart showed it as simply a 'RAW' partition. This was a bit of a problem as I now couldn't boot my work image at all!
After some playing around in the BIOS I found that the boot order had 'Windows Boot Manager' first and the hard drive itself listed second. If I changed the order so that the hard drive was first, I could then boot the work image but when I looked in the disk management screen my new installation showed as a 'RAW' partition!
So somehow the boot order seems to be causing one or other of the primary partitions to become unreadable which is presumably why it won't boot. I don't want to break the work image if I can help it... but I'd love the dual boot to work.
Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening and what to do about it?
James
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 8.1