I have a PC that I have been running Win 8 Consumer Preview since it was available. I have two HD's partitioned to dual boot Windows XP SP3 and Win 8, with Win 8 set as default. I have been running Win 8 over 95% of the time. Everything has been working fine until this morning. When I came out of screensaver in Win 8 and attempted to get to my login page nothing happened. So i shut down using the power button, after that Win 8 would not start, nor could I get to the dual boot screen. After a number of tries i finally got the dual boot screen and attempted to start in XP. XP nearly completely started (I had desktop, task bar, desktop icons, etc), but then it shut down as well and displayed a blue screen and error message “A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.”. I have tried starting from my XP install disk with the same error message (“A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” ). I have tried starting from USB flash drive that has my Win 8 Install. It is the same USB flash drive that i originally used to install Win 8. It hangs at the 'fish' screen. I have tried just starting the machine several times, but it hangs at 'Preparing Automatic Repair'. I have everything disconnected (printers. ethernet, USB Wifi adaptor). The only things connected are my keyboard/mouse, speakers, and (1) 17" monitor. I normally run a 23" widescreen and the 17" monitor. I have disconnected the slave HD and tried booting with XP install disk and USB Win 8 with no success. Currently, both HD's are connected. I tried a normal start up and the machine is stuck at 'Preparing Automatic Repair' This has never happened before such that I could not boot into either XP or the XP Install CD or the Win 8 USB Install flash drive, in order to attempt repairs to MBR or Win 8 troubleshooting diagnostics. Any ideas/help would be appreciated. Thx! Complete error message on Blue screen: “A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps: Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSk /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer. Technical Information: *** STOP: 0x00000007B (0xF78D2524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)”
I had Xp sp3 and windows 8 on dual boot and used windows 8 as my primary OS. But whenever windows 8 crashed/hanged and I pressed hard reset, then on restart it gives NTFS error and runs chkdsk on all partitions.When i start windows Xp it also does the same and runs chkdsk on all partitions.I then again start windows 8 and it runs chkdsk again. I repeat this procedure on both OS for 4~5 times and then both OS will start normally.But at last I got fed up and installed windows 7 and removed windows 8. Windows 8 has the option of automatic repair and it worked for me but I had to restart it about 10 times for the automatic repair option to complete.A lot of times automatic repair option will stop during repair and gives error that windows was not able to repair the computer.
Running checkdisk when starting older win in dual boot with win 8 is caused by new hybrid boot bits, which were misinterpreted by these older systems. Solution is to disable hybrid boot. It´s possible to disable in energy options, were you define what your power-button should do by pressing it. Or you can disable complete (hibernate-state won´t work too) via: Code: powercfg /hibernate off in an elevated cmd. regards
I dual boot. But I installed Windows 7 first and Windows 8 second. They are both on the same HD. Since you have two hard drives, I suggest setting your bios to boot from the disk that contains windows 7. Then you should be able to select Windows 8 from Control Panel/System/Advanced System Settings/Startup and Recovery/Settings. From the drop down list, you should be able to select either OS as your default operating system.