This is driving me nuts: I have two separate HDD's: one for windows 7 and one on which I recently installed Windows 10. When I have finished using the Windows 10 drive, shut down and plug my Windows 7 drive back in. When Windows 7 boots up, the mouse cursor is stuck in the middle of the screen. The mouse and keyboard do not work. I think I found a fix which is to reset my BIOS settings back to default (MB= ASUS Z87A). Does using Windows 10 change BIOS settings so that Windows 7 does not work?? Can anyone help me with this problem? Thanks!
Interesting. Reminds me how the AMD graphics drivers for switchable graphics actually change the position of hardware around. (At first I thought it changes something in ACPI) Takes a few restarts after cleaning the drivers for windows to return to normal.
Why not leave them both plugged in when you installed 10 & just dual boot, that would of been the easiest way IMO Normally one should install the earliest OS 1st then the newer ones after that. You might try plugging both HDDs in & doing a startup repair using the W7 DVD, you might have to run the startup repair twice. Then just leave them both plugged in & dual boot.
I had two drives before 10, one with 7 and one with XP. I cloned my 7 to a third, disconnected everything else and upgraded that to 10 (I wanted to keep my 7 configuration without having to manually re-create it). It's worked out pretty well and I did not have the problem you had with 7. If it was just a mouse and keyboard going out, sounds like a small detection glitch, and resetting the BIOS to fix is no big deal. Disconnecting your other drive during the install was also a very good idea--I intentionally did that so I wouldn't wind up with a dual-boot. The only weird problem I seem to have sometimes is after disconnecting and re-connecting my 10 drive to experiment with something, both XP and 7 often have this need to run check-disk, saying they have to be checked for consistency. This even happen before RTM. I never had such a problem with just the 7 and XP drives. Doesn't seem like a big deal--hasn't really hurt their operation or performance. Don't you leave all drives plugged in all the time? I do. I have the 10 drive as my default in the BIOS and if I want to use one of the others I just reboot and hit F8 to pick the boot drive. I wouldn't be plugging and un-plugging them all the time, if only to avoid the check-disk problems I described above and, among other things, your problem.
I have a hot swap drive bay so it's easy to change drives. I don't want dual boot - nor do I want to have all drives plugged in in case i get a virus. The keyboard / mouse issue is not a big deal (but it's a pain, and it's weird) except that I have another Windows 7 drive that has the mouse pointer frozen in the middle of the screen and I can't get that one to work.
I owned a computer biz for 25 years and I almost never, if ever, found a virus that travelled from one drive to another. Your mouse problem is weird--are you sure the connection is secure? If it's USB, did you plug an un-plug? Check your device manager for any error with it or uninstall and reinstall it?
It's what I do, dual boot, a single 500gb SSD split in 1/2, Install Windows 7, then install Windows 10. I prefer the Windows 7 boot loader. The 10 one is much prettier and is great if you want to use 10 but, if you select 7, it reboots the computer again to boot to 7. It pretty much fully loads 10... the 7 boot loader just loads as you select...faster over all ESP if you want to use 7...