Different sort of dual boot

Discussion in 'Windows 10' started by Underclocked, Nov 7, 2014.

  1. Underclocked

    Underclocked MDL Member

    Sep 3, 2013
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    My main pc has Windows 8.1 Pro on it and I had installed 10TP on an old Optiplex 745 (souped up pretty good). Got tired of going from machine to machine so decided to try something a bit different. Installed the drive from the Optiplex into my main machine as a 2nd hard drive (really a third counting the mSata drive). Made sure the original 8.1Pro booted up nicely, then set the bios to boot from the newly added 10TP drive. Figured it would blue screen.

    But it didn't. Instead it just took awhile to boot due to installing new hardware and reconfiguring. The hardware changes were substantial but 10TP handled it just fine. All I had to do was uninstall some Creative software that went with the older pc and then an automatic driver search for a piece of the onboard sound system.

    Next I booted back to 8.1 again using the bios boot selection. In 8.1, I used EasyBCD to add a 2nd entry for the 10TP drive. Then tried to reboot to 10TP. It won't complete the boot as I get an error telling me that winload.exe does not have a correct signature.

    Everything else works just fine, both OS boot so long as I choose them as the boot drive in bios. Anyone have a suggestion as to how I can fix the winload.exe issue using EasyBCD or other??

    We need a new build release... I'm obviously bored. :D
     
  2. pisthai

    pisthai Imperfect Human

    Jul 29, 2009
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    Just use the BIOS boot selection, which works fine. There's really no need for EasyBCD!
     
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  3. Rock Hunter

    Rock Hunter MDL Senior Member

    Dec 6, 2011
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    You can also select which version you want to boot up in Control Panel/System/Advanced System Settings/Startup and Recovery OR with MSCONFIG/Boot.
     
  4. Underclocked

    Underclocked MDL Member

    Sep 3, 2013
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    Understood (to both replies) but was hoping someone had a solution for the winload.exe signature issue.
     
  5. Rock Hunter

    Rock Hunter MDL Senior Member

    Dec 6, 2011
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    #5 Rock Hunter, Nov 7, 2014
    Last edited: Nov 7, 2014
    Is one of your disks UEFI? If so the file listed in EasyBCD should be winload.efi and not winload.exe.
     
  6. Underclocked

    Underclocked MDL Member

    Sep 3, 2013
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    No, both are legacy.
     
  7. Underclocked

    Underclocked MDL Member

    Sep 3, 2013
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    Well DUH!! Don't know why it took me so long to try it. Selected the Win10 drive as boot drive in the bios, went in to Win10 and used EasyBCD to add the Windows 8.1 install to the boot selections. Problem solved.
     
  8. CEW

    CEW MDL Senior Member

    Jan 21, 2011
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    You need to use the most recent bootmgr. Seems that is what you are doing now.
     
  9. Underclocked

    Underclocked MDL Member

    Sep 3, 2013
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    You are correct but I'm not sure in this case that it is JUST the bootmgr. I tried copying the bootmgr from 10 to 8.1 and still got the same error with boot entries made on the 8.1 drive. 8.1 still booted fine but it still didn't like winload.exe on Win10. Abandoned that and restored the original bootmgr to 8.1 (really didn't need to apparently but felt better doing it :) ). That's when the simple solution finally occurred to me.