Before I ask my question, I think it's better to explain what I want to do, in case someone has a better idea. I want to to have, in the same hard drive, a windows 7 and a windows 8 installation, but each windows cannot access the other. This means that the "normal" boot must always boot windows 7 and should not even know there is a windows 8 partition. Also, inside windows only one partition should be visible. The way I found to do this is install both windows 7 and 8 in different partitions, then use the disk management to remove the letter from the other windows partition. This solves half the problem, after boot each windows can only see itself. However, I could not create an unique boot, there doesn't seem to be a way to copy all the boot information to a usb stick so that if I boot from the hdd, it boots hdd partition 1 (windows 7) but if I boot from usb, it boots hdd partition 2 (windows 8). So now the question: Is there a way to copy all the boot information to another partition (preferably in a usb drive), but still boot the files from hdd? Thanks in advance.
Use a Imaging program such as Norton Ghost. It allows you to backup a partition or whole hard drive. then deploy it back to a partition or hard drive
Assuming "w:" is the drive letter of the Windows partition you want to boot from the boot manager on USB, and "u:" is the drive letter of the partition on USB, on an elevated command prompt: Copy bootmgr files and create entry for booting w:\windows: Code: bcdboot.exe w:\windows /s u: Update MBR on USB partition (bootsect.exe is available on Windows_DVD\boot\): Code: bootsect.exe /nt60 u: /mbr Set USB partition as active (e.g. in diskmgmt.msc) Also, if you really want the other partition to be inaccessible, removing the drive letter won't do much; without encrypting the other partition, this is not secure.
You can achieve this installing each windows on diferent hdd, 1 boot per hdd, one for windows7 one for win8. Then run the hdd you want from the bios boot menu. I don't know too much about security, but removing letter and hidind partion maybe solve your problem.
thanks for the help, I'll try the solutions here. As for encryption, I know without it it's not completely safe, but it should be safe enough for what I need.
I know a freeware AOMEI Partition Assistant (also Paragon could, but it need to pay for some money) could allows you directly move your system to another hard drive without reinstall any thing, which is much more flexible than you make an image and then restore the image to another drive. You may search AOMEI Partition Assistant on google.
I haven't tried this aspect of EasyBCD by NeoSmart Technologies in years, but I think you can achieve what you're looking for automatically through it. Don't quote me on that, I still use EasyBCD for other things, mainly renaming my Windows installations so if I have two Windows 7 or two Windows 8 installations, they're not all named the same thing, so I can be clear which one is newer. Make sure and perform image backups in case you screw something up with EasyBCD. I would image the Windows installations as well as the boot (System Reserved) partition.