Hello everyone. I installed windows 8 and activated it.. I didn't know it was eval. but anyways. I have on another hard drive windows 7 that was activated for a year now. When I activated my windows 8 rebooted and went to windows 7 its telling me my win. 7 isn't genuine and needs activation. Why?
So how do I fix this so I can have both? I'm new to all this so I just remember using a loader I think for win 7 but it has worked like a charm until this eval version of win8.
I'm NOT a friend of software boot managers, I use all times the Boot Manager of the Bios. So, that said, I would use 1 HD for Windows 8 and an other one for Windows 7! While installing the OS I would disconnect the HD which runs the other OS. After both are installed, I wouyld use the BIOS Boot Manager for booting the OS I like to run. That is done by using the Hot Key for the boot manager like: Asus MB: F8 Gigabyte NB: F12 ASRock and most other MB: F11 some MB's: F2 While startup the machine, hit the Key for your MB and you could than chose from an small screen which HD you like to start. The advantage of this procedure is, there isn't any software involved and the BIOS Boot Manager will work all time the BIOS is working. And you could still see the full drive with all content in either OS!
If you are running W7 and W8 on same machine I found I had to disable fastoot on W8 and also dont use hibernate. Disabling fastboot dosn't make a lot of difference to boot times particulary if you use a ssd.
thanks everyone. Yeah they are on separate Hd's. Win 7 I used a boot loader even though I don't know if I had to. I installed that enterprise win 7 on my gfs machine yesterday and it said already activated in systems. I will probably try the bios boot loader. I have to wait to reinstall win8 before I can play. Thanks again.
Howdy, howdy, so have you thought of using a boot manager? I find that the Plop Boot Manager v5.0 works pretty darn well and it doesn't matter were the second OS is, such as on Usb, partition, virtual machine, etc.... just Google search it. Oh yeaah, ITS FREE!!!!!
If you use the "legacy" boot manager for Windows 8 then everything works perfectly. Just open command prompt as an admin from Windows 8 and enter the following... Code: bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy Reboot to Windows 7 and install the loader and then you'll be fine.