I have Windows 7 installed on my SSD drive. Now, i've installed Windows 8 Consumer Preview on my HDD drive. They are both working, but the problem is, there is no boot menu. If I want to choose which OS to boot I actually must choose which drive to boot - SSD or HDD by pressing F8. There is no pretty boot menu screen like this one here:
That is probably because both OS's have their own MBR on seperate disks. Is there a way to make Windows 8 write MBR to SSD drive where windows 7 is installed?
I think you only get the option screen of booting either system if they are both on the same HDD.
Windows 8 is certainly not dual boot friendly because it seems that if Windows 7 is on the same drive as Windows 8 the MBR for Windows 7 gets wrecked as soon as Windows 8 is removed unless you have another partition with something on it stuck between both partitions.
Just to clarify. You cannot move the MBR because that is a fixed area on the first 512 bytes of the disk. What you move is the bootmgr or the BCD respectively.
What seemed to have happened here is that the Windows 8 installer decided to put a seperate bootmgr on the HDD (probably because the Windows 7 bootmgr or the 100MB system partition was too small to accomodate the Win8 BCD). Have a look in Disk Management whether there is a 350MB system partition on the HDD.
I would leave it that way. When you mix them up, you may run into all kinds of problems. My tutorial which chev65 mentions is for moving the Win7 bootmgr from the 100MB system partition to C:.
Thank you. Yes, I also think it would be the best if I leave it as it is, because I always mess things up when I play with bootmgr I guess I'll just have to press F8 to choose which disk/OS to boot...
