How do I add Windows 7 to my Windows 8 boot dialog (win 7 restored)

daveog3

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Laptop: Dell xps 17
It comes with windows 7 as default. I have a full disk image to the windows 7 install which allows me to restore either the complete disk or one or more of the 3 partitions contained in that disk
Unnamed 4 MB
Recovery 8.9 GIGs
C (Windows 7) 460 GIGS (backup only 20 GIGS)

I installed Windows 8 by usb from win 7 and kept nothing of the win 7 install.

Now I resized the win 8 partition from 445 to 330 gigs roughly
and created a new partition in the free 100 GIGS but with no drive letter (should I have given it a drive letter ?)
I imaged back the win 7 C: partition to the newly created partition
but am at a loss as to how I add an entry to the Windows 8 Boot menu to boot the win 7 install.

I've followed the tutorial to add the safe mode option and have the Win 8 boot menu working properly but the tutorials don't seem to have an option where you restore an install from a backup image

Any and all help would be much appreciated

PS: I'm hoping to do this in a way that neither OS sees the other one.
Its much faster to mess with OS by restoring from images that going through the process of reinstalling if you mess one up so this might make for a good tutorial to add to the others
 

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My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 Pro
You do it with bcdedit.exe, easier if you assign a drive letter to win7 partition - you can remove it again afterwards.

E.G.

If you assign letter E to your win7 partition, open an elevated command and type:

bcdedit /copy {current} /d "Windows 7"

That will return a long number , a GUID

bcdedit /set {put_new_GUID_here} device partition=E:

bcdedit /set {put_new_GUID_here} osdevice partition=E:

bcdedit /deletevalue {current} bootmenupolicy
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    7/8/ubuntu/Linux Deepin
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
@SIW should the last line be better
bcdedit /deletevalue {put_new_GUID_here} bootmenupolicy

There are also other elements which could be deleted for the Win7 loader:
sipolicy
inmemorysettings
these are new Win 8 specific.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    XP, Win7, Win8_Eval
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Acer Notebook
    CPU
    Intel
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