I am brand new to this site. So please correct me if I am posting in the wrong place. I am one of those people who had problems with Windows 8 running my computer in AHCI mode and recognizing my SATA drives. While I kind of have that figured out, what I am doing is installing Win XP on one hard drive, Win 7 on another, Win 8 on another, and Ubuntu on the last. Here is my current issue. I made the mistake of installing Windows 8 first, so I installed Win XP and then Win 7. I had lost my boot manager for 8 and could not boot into my Win 8 installation. So, I created another partition and installed Win 8 again in order to recover the boot manager. That done, I can boot into my first Windows 8 installation, and I would like to delete the partition I created with Win 8 on it, but that's where the boot manager is NOW. What can i do? I want to keep my first Windows 8 installation on this hard drive and have the boot manager back. For some reason, the dvd disks I created are not working to repair that installation and I don't know why. Any ideas? Thank you. Wendy
Hello Wendy, sounds like you'll have to switch the active partition with diskpart, activate the preferred one and install the bootsector with bootsect.exe, fix the loader with bcdboot and the it should boot. But for sure you'll have to create an entry for windows xp in the bcdstore manually. To be honest your explanation sounds a little bit confusing. What's your partition layout? Paste a screenshot if possible! bR PS: any questions, post back.
I tried to paste a screenshot of "My Computer", but it was too large. I'm sorry. I have four internal hard drives. Two of them are Terabytes. I put Windows 7 and 8 on those two. However, because I could not find a way to boot into Windows 8 because it was the first operating system installed, I went on to install XP and then 7. Still unable to boot into my hard drive that had Windows 8, I created a partition on the hard drive that had 7 installed and installed Windows 8 again thinking I could boot into the Windows 8 hard drive and then I could delete the partition I created because I don't need 2 Windows 8 OS's. Well, if I delete the partition, it is clear that I will again lose the Boot Manager and be right back where I started. Interestingly enough, I used the Windows 8 DVD and while it would not repair my first Windows 8 Boot Manager, it created a boot manager that is like the Windows 7 one. Very Weird. Thank you. Not sure if I'm going to leave it this way. And next, I am going to install Ubuntu because according to what I've been reading that operating system should be installed last. Thanks. Wendy