Database Users

[Q]Trying to dual boot alongside Win 7, need GPT disc?

I've been unable to install the preview. I made a separate partition, but it tells me that I have a EFI system and need a GPT disc. So I tried converting it from MBR to GPT, but still got the same error. Had to delete the entire disc to do this by the way. The ironic part is that now I couldn't install Windows 7 BECAUSE I had a GPT disc, so I didn't risk trying to install Windows 8 first by formatting through the installation program, in case it would refuse to instal win 7. Anyone have a clue? Oh and of course I booted from the dvd.
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Not sure what you did wrong or why its not working but heres the guide I followed to install the 64bit with developer tools.
1. I used easeus partition master free edition to shrink my windows 7 partition and created 60gb of unallocated space. By the way my windows 7 partition shows up as basic mbr and is in the ntfs format.
2. I downloaded the 64 dev preview.
3. Since no dvd's I had are 4.9gb I downloaded windows 7 usb dvd tool
4. Then ran it and pointed it to the dev preview iso and then to my flash drive(which had to be erased)
5. Booted from the usb and installed the preview onto the new partition and haven't had a single problem dual booting both.

Thanks, but I did pretty much the same. Except that I downloaded the version without the dev tools that was 3.6 gb, and burned that to a dvd and booted from it.
Oh and I did screw up my first partitioning attempt, I used the built in tool to make a partition and ignored the warning telling me that it would be converted to dynamic, making it impossible to install Windows on the disc. I had to reformat the disc too revert it, I did this when I reinstalled Windows 7. So I don't see how this could have anything too do with this issue. My disc shows up as basic MBR now as well.
Anyway I'll try again later when I get home from work.
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I reinstalled my windows 7.. divide the hd into two.25gb each..after that. I make bootable usb flash using wintobootic. Flawless installed windows 8 in 25gb partition. Window 8 will prompt u to choose OS when booting.

hey
i just put a extra hd in my laptop put windows 8 on that one when it comes on it ask's me if i want to boot 7 or 8

I dual booted with gag. When I run W8 it thinks its the C drive

This has probably been addressed but here goes....
I partitioned a drive for W8, called it drive P. Loaded W8 and ran it, worked nicely and wanted to go install gag. Once I installed gag I ran W8 again and it worked ok again. Then I wanted to use my W7 and tried to get to it, and for some reason I have to go through the Windows bootloader. Where you get a dos style screen and have to choose between W7 or W8 (keep in mind this is after you make your selection using gag), I choose W7. It got stuck on the loading screen (the one where it ways "windows 7" below the windows icon. Had to turn off my comp cause it wouldn't get past that screen.
Then I went into W8, which loaded fine and opened the disk management. It said that my main hard drive partition which has W7 and all of my files on it was completely empty and no longer named the "C" drive. Now my drive with W8 was called the "C" drive.
So I ran uninstalled/reinstalled GAG and somehow I got back to W7 with all of my files there.
But im afraid to run W8 again since I feel like W8 needs to run on the C drive, and im worried I might actually lose my real C drive.
Can someone explain what is going on with my comp, and a safe way to boot between the two OS'?

Its built into windows 8.
This is what I did.
Used disk management within windows 7 to shrink the partition its currently on. Shrunk it 50g.
Now you will have an unformatted partition. Use mini partition tool to format to ntfs. Also assign the partition a drive letter. I used W.
Now use magic disc to mount the windows 8 ISO to the virtual drive.
Don't run setup. Open the drive so you can see the contents of the ISO.
Now in the sources folder run the setup.exe, Not the one on the root of the ISO.
Setup will start. Install windows 8 to the partition you just made.
Let windows 8 complete setup and get all the way to the desktop or metro UI.
Restart your computer.
During the loading you will come across a screen that allows you to choose the OS. Now by default it times out at 5 seconds. At the bottom of the screen you'll see choose default OS and other settings. Click that within 5 seconds.
Change that to whatever you want. I changed mine to 30 seconds to give me enough time.
I had a similar issue when cloning my drive to an external to take with me using pwboot. Windows 8 would load fine but windows 7 wouldn't. But worked just fine on my internal drive. Mostly just use my external to use my old gateway with a broken internal hdd. Seriously hard to find an old school 2.5" IDE hdd. But windows 8 couldn't install my video card driver for s-video out so I stuck with just windows 7 on my external and never figured out the problem. Dual booting on my aspire one works like a champ though.
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[Q] No Drives Found on Windows 8 Install (SATA / IDE Mode))

I recently installed Windows 8 x86 M3 using Daemon Tools from inside Windows 7. So Far I am loving it, but it has a few glitches, and I cannot install all of my programs since some of them are only for x64. Obviously I cannot run the install from within an x86 environment. I used the Windows USB/DVD Tool to format and copy the install files to an 8gb usb flash drive. It boots fine and I begin the install. However I get an error when I reach the time to choose a hard disk to install to. No Drives Found! I click browse to select the drivers and in the browse menu all of my disk drives are listed...I can even navigate to my chipset driver folder. When I get to the proper folder the driver for the nvidia chipset pops up. I click install, and Windows begins to install the drivers. After a few seconds it completes and then gives me the same error...No Drives Found!
I currently have my 2 SATA drives in IDE Mode. This is because I do not want to set up a RAID Array for fear of losing all the data on both drives. So I assumed in IDE Mode Windows shouldnt need a RAID driver.
Does anyone have any ideas to help me out with this? I was thinking windows 7 portable x64, but that requires a 16gb Flash drive...so I read. Maybe XP portable x64? Or just any clue how to get my drives detected?

what happens to me himself and tried everything copy the drivers on a CD but nothing

so to fix this i am considering switching to raid. i am goint to copy all of my data to my 1tb hdd. then add my 2tb hdd to the raid array by itself. my question is can i mount the 1tb sata hdd, not in the raid array, to copy the data to the new raid array before converting the 1tb hdd to raid? or can this only be done with usb or in linux?

i had this problem and it turned out to be a buggered download of the ISO, re downloaded it and it worked fine.
cant promise it will work for you but im chuffed with it now and thats the only thing i did

Sorry if I miss understand you, but are you trying to install 32bit Windows 8 on an 64x Machine? And the Disk Image is a 32bit Version?
Try Downloading the 64bit Developer Preview from Microsoft. Then use the Windows 7 USB Download tool and create a install drive from the ISO file. Reboot and it should work. I've run into this before an it's usually when I use a DVD.
I'd link you to the ISO's and USB tool but I'm a new user :C

[Q] 1st time SSD upgrade- Is it possible to avoid a reinstall?

So I'm considering throwing in my first SSD. I'm looking at nothing too fancy (OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SATA3 6GB/s, Read: 560MB/s, Write: 430MB/s).
I already have Windows 8 Pro installed and activated on a 500 Sata HD. I'd ideally like to throw in the SSD and have Windows running off of that. Now I've already seen a lot of posts recommended a clean install. Which I'd like to avoid if possible. I'm wondering if I could say, create a back up image of my C: from my SATA drive, wipe everything, install the SSD and do a fresh Win 8 install. Then once I'm up and running restore that image.
Or use some other Windows 8 recovery feature to back up files, settings and apps.
Anyone know if this is possible within Windows 8? I'm ultimately trying to avoid as much reinstalling of apps and programs as possible.

It doesn't hurt to find out. Do your image backup, pull out the HDD, plug in the SSD, and restore. If it works, great. If not, plug the HDD back in and figure out an alternative.
I don't see why that wouldn't work, other than Win8 installing any needed driver for the SSD, and perhaps a re-auth, since a HDD change qualifies as a "major" config change.
I'm assuming you already have a good image backup program handy.

So I guess I'd lose my activation key?

Try reading some articles about it? I have no experience with it so i have no idea:
http://lifehacker.com/5837543/how-to-migrate-to-a-solid+state-drive-without-reinstalling-windows

why don't you just ghost the drive this is what I do. I forget the name of the software I use but it is free and really easy and you can ghost the drive you on as it runs before windows boots. I will update once I have found the software as its been a while since I needed to do this.
edit: I don't have it on my laptop and I wont be back to work till Monday but if you google clone hard drive there are many options. You want one that will clone the running partition.
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/home-edition/

pistol44 said:
So I guess I'd lose my activation key?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Although I have never tried it, you can backup your windows activation activation following this:
http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/35737-GUIDE-How-to-backup-and-restore-Windows-8-activation

or just clone the harddrive like I said then its all just as if it was on the old you just plug new one in and off you go, then format the old one once tested. 2 points on this your going back into same hardware so that does not matter and windows 8 you can take the hdd out of a pc plug it into diff hardware and off you go after a slightly longer boot. I have swapped from an amd fx based desktop and put into an intel Centrino laptop and worked. I did this after cloning the drive so both desktop and laptop have activated windows 8 from same cloned hard drive (bit odd though as seems to avoid the need for keys and could be a work around to distro win 8)

pistol44 said:
So I'm considering throwing in my first SSD. I'm looking at nothing too fancy (OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SATA3 6GB/s, Read: 560MB/s, Write: 430MB/s).
I already have Windows 8 Pro installed and activated on a 500 Sata HD. I'd ideally like to throw in the SSD and have Windows running off of that. Now I've already seen a lot of posts recommended a clean install. Which I'd like to avoid if possible. I'm wondering if I could say, create a back up image of my C: from my SATA drive, wipe everything, install the SSD and do a fresh Win 8 install. Then once I'm up and running restore that image.
Or use some other Windows 8 recovery feature to back up files, settings and apps.
Anyone know if this is possible within Windows 8? I'm ultimately trying to avoid as much reinstalling of apps and programs as possible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Are you more worried about your desktop apps or your RT apps? If you have signed in with a Microsoft account and you are on your Trusted PC, your RT app settings will transfer to the new installs and you already know most RT apps install super fast.
If you are worried about your desktop apps, they will install much faster on an SSD drive and just make a backup copy of your "AppData" folder. That's what I did when refreshing my PC caused a bunch of errors and I re-installed.
Windows 8 uses different algorithms for SSDs than for HDDs so ghosting your drive is a bad idea.

dragon_76 said:
Are you more worried about your desktop apps or your RT apps? If you have signed in with a Microsoft account and you are on your Trusted PC, your RT app settings will transfer to the new installs and you already know most RT apps install super fast.
If you are worried about your desktop apps, they will install much faster on an SSD drive and just make a backup copy of your "AppData" folder. That's what I did when refreshing my PC caused a bunch of errors and I re-installed.
Windows 8 uses different algorithms for SSDs than for HDDs so ghosting your drive is a bad idea.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
True, the RT apps will come back after the install.. I guess I was more concerned for the 15 to 20 games I had installed. I'm looking at a good 4-6 hours of re-install time to get it back to the same state I'm at now. All personal items are backed up externally so I'm ok there.
I guess I've considered just re-installing from scratch now. But last question is will I need to re-activate Windows 8 if I'm adding an SSD? Since I'll be formatting my current HDD, installing an SSD which I'll want the OS running off of I guess there's no way to do a fresh install and keep activation since I'll be formatting the drive the OS is on.
Can I hypothetically, install the SSD initiate a Windows "reset" and hope that it gives me the choice to format my old HDD and install to the new SSD. For some reason I think not. Or do I need to image my C: drive, install the SSD then copy the image over then do a reset? I'm so confused..

pistol44 said:
True, the RT apps will come back after the install.. I guess I was more concerned for the 15 to 20 games I had installed. I'm looking at a good 4-6 hours of re-install time to get it back to the same state I'm at now. All personal items are backed up externally so I'm ok there.
I guess I've considered just re-installing from scratch now. But last question is will I need to re-activate Windows 8 if I'm adding an SSD? Since I'll be formatting my current HDD, installing an SSD which I'll want the OS running off of I guess there's no way to do a fresh install and keep activation since I'll be formatting the drive the OS is on.
Can I hypothetically, install the SSD initiate a Windows "reset" and hope that it gives me the choice to format my old HDD and install to the new SSD. For some reason I think not. Or do I need to image my C: drive, install the SSD then copy the image over then do a reset? I'm so confused..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can type in your serial and it will fail to activate by internet. Select to activate by phone and it should work, deactivating your old, erased installation.
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Merging my Windows 7 Partition.

Ok guys let me give you a little background first.
I have a Lenovo Laptop and i wanted to upgrade to Windows 8. Lenovo puts alot of their own programs and stuff on the computer that were actually quite useful at times but they posted a pdf on their website that told me to uninstall 10 billion programs and drivers so I decided to install Windows 8 on a new partition I made which I then installed Windows 8 too without a hitch. I also did this because I didnt know how I would feel about the new OS but I really like it so i'm going to stay with it.
BTW I'm not savvy with this partition stuff at all. I was walked through it. I'm not a total noob though. i just get nervous.
My question to you guys is how can I remove the Windows 7 OS completely and merge that storage with my Windows 8 OS.
I have read its not as simple as just deleting the Windows 7 partition. I have read that if you delete something called a bootmgr (im pretty sure that means bootmanager)it will screw everything up and that it is sometimes in different locations.
I'm attaching a photo of what my drives look like currently. I'm guessing the bootmgr is on the partition with the red arrow pointing to it? If I am correct how do I add the Windows 7 partition (yellow arrow) to the Windows 8 partition (blue arrow)
The photo was taken from within the Windows 8 OS. i hope I have been clear enough for you guys.

You can delete your Windows 7 partition because Windows 8 now controls the bootmanager. Also, If you do delete the partition and boot manager is erased, I can walk you through restoring it. Plus the disk you burned to install Windows 8 with contains recovery tools that can restore the it. Just boot from the disk like you did when you installed Windows 8 and instead of selecting install now choose "Repair my computer" or "Fix problems that prevent Windows from starting". Microsoft has done a good job of making stuff like this recoverable from. Also, make sure you make a System Restore point. If you have an external drive you can also make a "recovery disk" in Windows 8 that will make an exact copy of the partitions of your choice. It takes a lot of space and will completely wipe the drive, so be sure to save any important files on the external drive before doing this.

housry23 said:
You can delete your Windows 7 partition because Windows 8 now controls the bootmanager. Also, If you do delete the partition and boot manager is erased, I can walk you through restoring it. Plus the disk you burned to install Windows 8 with contains recovery tools that can restore the it. Just boot from the disk like you did when you installed Windows 8 and instead of selecting install now choose "Repair my computer" or "Fix problems that prevent Windows from starting". Microsoft has done a good job of making stuff like this recoverable from. Also, make sure you make a System Restore point. If you have an external drive you can also make a "recovery disk" in Windows 8 that will make an exact copy of the partitions of your choice. It takes a lot of space and will completely wipe the drive, so be sure to save any important files on the external drive before doing this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This article told me the partition that is marked as active has the bootmgr on it. Is that correct?
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pwnerman said:
This article told me the partition that is marked as active has the bootmgr on it. Is that correct?
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Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think it is inside Windows 8. If you have Windows 7 installed and then install Windows 8, all the boot operations are handled by Windows 8 unless you have a third party boot manager installed or a Linux partition that would use grub. You are safe to delete the Windows 7 partition. It won't screw anything up. You are over thinking and over reading. If this partition WAS the one handling the boot operations, then as soon as you installed Windows 8, that changed. Just delete the Windows 7 partition and extend the Windows 8. You will probably have to do it during a boot up and it will probably take a third party program like Paragon Partition manager free or gparted live cd, but it's not going to screw up your bootmgr. Only way that would happen is if you deleted a Linux partition.

pwnerman said:
This article told me the partition that is marked as active has the bootmgr on it. Is that correct?
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Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yes, the active partition must be the boot partition
housry23 said:
I think it is inside Windows 8. If you have Windows 7 installed and then install Windows 8, all the boot operations are handled by Windows 8 unless you have a third party boot manager installed or a Linux partition that would use grub. You are safe to delete the Windows 7 partition. It won't screw anything up. You are over thinking and over reading. If this partition WAS the one handling the boot operations, then as soon as you installed Windows 8, that changed. Just delete the Windows 7 partition and extend the Windows 8. You will probably have to do it during a boot up and it will probably take a third party program like Paragon Partition manager free or gparted live cd, but it's not going to screw up your bootmgr. Only way that would happen is if you deleted a Linux partition.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Err, no, that isn't always true, my Boot files are on a separate partition to my Win 8, if I delete my Win 7 I will lose the ability to boot, of course its fixable with the Win 8 DVD. Win 8 does take over the boot manager as is fairly obvious, but it doesn't change the location, its for this very reason that when installing multiple copies and versions of windows you always start with the oldest, each successive install will update the boot manager but it will leave it in place, unless of course you install Linux which can and will screw it right up an around the corner if your not very careful!

It's been stuck on this screen after I deleted and extended the drive with ease us partition manager. It rebooted I saw the lenovo bios screen then the Windows logo. Then this screen showed up and hasn't moved for about 2 hours. I'm guessing I got screwed.
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