Dual boot - Windows 7 and 10 - On separate drives. Are BIOS or EasyBCD the only options?

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I have a desktop Windows PC with two drives. One has a complete Windows 7 installation and the second is now fully upgraded to Windows 10.

I want to see a menu choice of operating systems on boot up.

At the moment I go into the BIOS to boot from the non-default option, but this involves several levels of the menu.

Question

Is EasyBCD (or a clone) the only way forward?

Note: In my searches I have come across the name bootmgr.exe but I haven't found anything about that that helps me.

Any ideas how to proceed?

chasly from UK

Posted 2015-08-18T15:43:39.010

Reputation: 113

I would try installing W10 first, then install W7 with the W10 drive connected during install, W7 should install a nice bootloader (never tried it). Personally I like EasyBCD for this type of situation. – Moab – 2015-08-19T15:45:09.403

I could try that. The problem is that W7 is loaded from the recovery partition on the disk and so returns it to 'factory' status. It assumes what hardware will be there and I'm pretty sure won't even try to see if there's another disk on the system. – chasly from UK – 2015-08-23T18:57:59.980

1Do you have anything against using EasyBCD? – Mahmoud Al-Qudsi – 2015-09-17T17:16:12.970

This could be done, back in the day, with 16-bit boot managers... I'm guessing it was rpm (Ranish Partition Manager), but might've been XFDisk. GAG was probably easier to use. But all that that is probably based on code that assumes 16-bit operation to set up and, even more limiting, MBR-based disks (older solutions that didn't use GPT). So if you're using GPT, you might need to look for a newer solution. I would probably search for "boot manager". Using BIOS may be less ideal; I think some implementations worked by hiding a drive, or re-ordering it, so auto-assigned drive names would differ – TOOGAM – 2015-11-08T19:52:47.687

Answers

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Visual BCD Editor is an alternative. Can create a Windows loader for UEFI or BIOS firmware by simply changing extension of winload to .exe or .efi

See also Dual-boot Repair tool for Windows 10. Works also for BIOS of UEFI booting.

I would run Dual-boot Repair in Windows 10 and then add a Windows 7 loader using Visual BCD Editor. All is done on click.

To eliminate preloading of Windows 10 graphical boot files you simply change the value of element "Boot Menu Policy" (0x250000c2) to legacy or 0. This is to be done for Windows 10 loader. Windows 7 does not know about immersive boot menu.

snayob

Posted 2015-08-18T15:43:39.010

Reputation: 4 044

I hadn't heard about immersive boot menu. I've just looked it up. I missed out W8 completely. I'll see if any of your ideas will work for me. Thanks – chasly from UK – 2015-08-23T19:03:12.973

Microsoft named this "Metro" boot menu first (I think for marketing purpose) but the underlying files have the name "immersive". Metro sounds better than immersive. Now they call it "graphic" boot menu and the old look - "text" or legacy boot menu. – snayob – 2015-08-23T19:10:34.070

Asked: 2015-08-18T15:43:39.010

Viewed: 671 times

Active: 2015-11-08T18:15:59.470