Skip to main content

Create Dual Boot Environment Win 10

Thread needs solution

My old computer was setup with a dual-boot environment, Win10 and Win 7, using separate drives for each system. My new system came with Win10 already installed and is working to my satisfaction. The new computer uses UEFI, the old one had simple MBR. MY new computer has multiple drives already installed, so I can place Win 7 on a separate drive. My question is which specific driver files do I have to include when I use ATI 2017 universal restore to create the the Win 7 drive. I created the Acronis backup of the Win 7 disk from within Win 10. I created a list in .xlsx format using driverquery on the new machine, but it's a long one. I'm attaching it to this topic in the hope someone can look through and suggest which ones are essential. I have a utility (somewhere) that allows easy creation of a dual boot environment.

Many thanks,

Norm

Attachment Size
drvlist.xlsx 49.42 KB
0 Users found this helpful

Norman, I am not sure that this will work given the differences in the way your two computers work in terms of BIOS / EFI which each using a different mode, i.e the old computer using Legacy BIOS and the new using EFI.

Part of the problem here is that on your new computer, Windows 10 is already installed using EFI whereas the Windows 7 computer used BIOS along with the System Reserved Partition to hold the equivalent boot data that is stored in your EFI partition.

What you may be able to do is to install a vanilla copy of Windows 7 on a second drive on the new computer, this will be added as an additional boot entry in the EFI partition shared with the Windows 10 drive.  Once you have the vanilla (very basic) Windows 7 OS installed and working (even if only as a 30 day trial), then you can try to restore just the Windows 7 OS partition from the old computer.  Do not restore the System Reserved partition.

At that point, with the Windows 7 OS partition restored, you can try to boot the Acronis Universal Restore media and select the Windows 7 OS in order to prepare that OS to work with the new hardware found in the new computer.  This will either work as is, or will prompt for device drivers for any specific hardware that needs them.  Note: Do not try to boot the Windows 7 OS before running AUR.

The key drivers that may be needed for the Windows 7 OS are those for the motherboard chipset and for the disk controller.

You may still need to do a Startup Repair for the Windows 7 OS after doing all of the above.

One further point to note: You should match the disk controller mode used by both systems, i.e. the old computer and new computer, where this is likely to be AHCI for the old computer but may use RAID on the new one depending on the type of disk drives installed.

Steve,

Thank you for the comprehensive answer. You touched on all of the points that had me worried. Since I use Win 7 only to run a couple of applications that will not run in Windows 10, I think what I will do instead is try this utility, which promises to boot the system if I connect the old drive using at PATA to USB converter. https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

Norm

Norm, you have further challenges if your old Windows 7 drive is an IDE / PATA drive and the new system uses only SATA drives / controllers, plus although you can use EasyBCD to configure the Windows Boot Configuration Data to add new OS drives to boot, Microsoft do not allow external USB Hard drives to be bootable into Windows, so I doubt that using a PATA to USB converter will work as you are hoping.

You may be better advised to look for alternative solutions for the couple of applications that need Windows 7, i.e. finding Windows 10 alternatives for these and keep everything as simple as possible.  Support for Windows 7 ends in 2020 which is not too far away now.

If you cannot find alternative software for your applications, then look for a license to install a fresh copy of Windows 7 on the new computer and install the old applications to that copy (assuming that your licenses for these applications permit this).

If the old system is backed up (imaged) and deployed after booting the recovery media in UEFI mode to a GPT formatted disk, the resulting deployment should result in a working UEFI converted OS.  However, using UR for the hardware differences would still need to be considered (does the new system even support Windows 7 - are drivers available for it?)  along with the SATA mode selected in the bios - as it would need to be the same on both systems.  This is supported, and I've had pretty good luck converting a legacy/MBR install to UEFI/GPT, but not everyone does. 

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2017/#20171.html

With Acronis True Image 2017 New Generation you also can convert BIOS to UEFI systems.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2017/#13043.html

How to migrate an original system to a larger hard drive?

Acronis True Image 2017 New Generation now allows migrating or restoring systems from a previously created archive, to hard drives larger than 2^32 bytes (2 TB for disks with standard 512-bytes sized logical sector or 16 TB for disks with 4 KB (4096-bytes) sized logical sector).

You can do it using Acronis media or booting to UEFI-based operating systems with Acronis True Image 2017 New Generation installed:

To migrate a system using Acronis Media:

  1. Boot your system from an Acronis media.
  2. Select Acronis True Image 2017 New Generation (Full version) in the boot menu to continue booting from the media.
  3. Navigate to the required wizard (Restore or Clone) and follow instructions.

To migrate a system in UEFI-based operating system:

  1. Boot to an UEFI-capable Windows operating system. (boot your rescue media in UEFI MODE)
  2. Run Acronis True Image 2017 New Generation, go to the Backup and recovery tab, click Recover on the toolbar and follow instructions.

Ideally, test this with just the one OS drive (after restoring and convertign from bios to UEFI) on the new system and see how it goes.  (make sure things like secure boot are disabled, the SATA mode is the same as the old PC, the boot order is correct afer the restore or the new drive is attached), etc.  Then run UR if need be to generalize the drivers so Windows can boot on the new hardware (be sure to have drivers downloaded ahead of time - especially for things like UsB or networking, which may be needed to function after the restore or help you get other drivers).

If/when you get that working, you should be able to pop in the original drive with Windows 10 and have both installed in the same computer at that point.  You should then be able to use the bios to switch between the drive you want to boot into, or run startup repair or something like EASY BCD to give you a bootloader menu to pick which to boot to so you don't have to go into the bios.

Steve,

I have available licenses for both Win 7 and the applicatons. I just wanted to shortcut the process of rebuilding the system. I'll probably opt for that path. First I'll digest the answer from Bobbo_3COXI.

Norm

Sounds like I should upgrade to NG and try to follow your path. Steve Smith has already listed a number of challenges I'll face along the way.

I still have my original question - can you suggest which drivers from the list I sent should be included when running UR?

Thank you,

Norm

Norman, if you already have ATIH 2017 build 8029 you do not need NG as this is a Premium, Subscription only product and the function to convert BIOS to UEFI has been available in most standard versions of ATIH for some time and is described in the User Guide - see Migration method which covers all the possible permutations of migrating between these different boot methods.

Ditto to Steve. The documentation for 2017 defaults to NG, but 8029 standard and all versions of 2017 should do the conversion as long as you boot the rescue media in UEFI mode to perform the restore.

Norman:

Have you considered installing Windows 7 to a Virtual Machine that runs under Windows 10? This will allow you to run your legacy Windows 7 applications alongside your current Windows 10 applications without the hassle of creating a dual-boot environment.

VMWare Workstation Player 12 is a free download https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmw…. Just install it and then install Windows 7 and your couple of legacy applications to the VM.

Ues, I have tried using a VM. However, one of the legacy programs I want to keep alive requires direct access to its company branded USB drives. I used Vmware from Oracle and the drives showed up as network drives which was not acceptable to the program. I will try Vmware to see if it handles drives differently.

Norman:

On my Windows 7 VM hosted by VMWare Workstation 12 Player, plugging in a USB flash drive shows up in Windows 7 as a USB removable device, so hopefully this will work for you.

Problem solved! Installed VMWare Workstation 12 Player, installed Windows 7, installed my legacy program, then plugged in the external USB drives. Success!

Thank you once again.

Norm

Norman, great to hear, and thanks to Mark for his suggestion of using VM Workstation to do this.