Dual booting with Win7 - It doesnt see Vista

[fallguy]

I had Vista installed on my Raptor as C. Installed Win7 on another HD, on D. Ive been dual booting for years, but it didnt give me an option when booting up, which OS to select, as it always has in the past with several other OS's. I can manually change which HD to pick in my BIOS, and it will boot from it, and to the OS I want. But thats annoying.

Went to MSCONFIG, and then to boot, there in no other OS there but the OS I am in. So Im a little confused, maybe its just a bad BIOS option selected, but I dont see how. Maybe Win7 is different, any help would be great.

[Archer75]

You should have a key to hit that will give you a bootloader.

I run my OS's on their own drives. When I boot up I just hit esc and I got a menu letting me choosing which drive to boot. It's a function of the bios but I don't actually have to go into the bios and change the drive order.

I use this because i'm always playing around with OS's and I don't want to screw up the MBR, GRUB or anything else.

[magnetik]

^^^^^
that's exactly how I do mine. much easier having a separate drive for linux, xp, vista 64, and 7 and just have to choose which hd on bootup

just hookup each hd individually to install the os on each drive to c, then hook them both back up and choose your boot drive. easy

[MrF]

I had Vista installed on my Raptor as C. Installed Win7 on another HD, on D. Ive been dual booting for years, but it didnt give me an option when booting up, which OS to select, as it always has in the past with several other OS's. I can manually change which HD to pick in my BIOS, and it will boot from it, and to the OS I want. But thats annoying.
The advantage is that if some day you decide to remove/modify one of the two OS, the other will continue to behave exactly the same as before.
With most motherboards, you can bring up a boot device selection menu by pressing F12 (instead of entering the BIOS every time) at boot time to select which OS to boot.

If you want to get a dual-boot menu, you need to make sure the hard drive with Vista on it has boot priority when you install Win7 on the second hard drive.
Then, Win7 modifies the boot loader of Vista and that is what gives you the boot menu.

It sounds like you changed the boot priority (or it changed automatically when you installed the new hard drive) and gave priority to the new hard drive before you installed Win7.

[fallguy]

It sounds like you changed the boot priority (or it changed automatically when you installed the new hard drive) and gave priority to the new hard drive before you installed Win7.

Ding ding! I forgot that I added my second HD after I installed Vista. So of course it wouldnt give me the boot menu as it has always in the past. My new motherboard has just one IDE connector, and I ordered a sata dvd burner. It came in two days after my other parts, and I didnt want to wait. So I had my old dvd burner connected via ide, and left my ide hd unhooked. Then hooked up the sata burner and then my ide hd because the ide connector was free. Then installed Win7 on my ide hd. Vista was on a sata Raptor.

I forgot all about that until you mentioned it. I may just leave it like it is, it is nice to not have to worry about a boot loader. Thanks to all.

[Spidey329]

The advantage is that if some day you decide to remove/modify one of the two OS, the other will continue to behave exactly the same as before.
With most motherboards, you can bring up a boot device selection menu by pressing F12 (instead of entering the BIOS every time) at boot time to select which OS to boot.

If you want to get a dual-boot menu, you need to make sure the hard drive with Vista on it has boot priority when you install Win7 on the second hard drive.
Then, Win7 modifies the boot loader of Vista and that is what gives you the boot menu.

It sounds like you changed the boot priority (or it changed automatically when you installed the new hard drive) and gave priority to the new hard drive before you installed Win7.

I was wondering why my dual-boot (dual HD) of XP/Win7 wasn't working automatically like it is "supposed to". I had switched my boot priority right before installing Win7. Makes sense.