Dual Boot Windows 7 and Windows 10 from separate drives?

[peter_s]

Seems like an age old question but it seems like I am close. I would like to get a boot option menu on reboot and choose from two different Windows (7 & 10) on two different drives. I have Windows 7 32bit on my D drive and Windows 10 64bit on my C: drive. I was led to believe I could add it with this command:

bcdboot d:\windows /d /addlast

However I am getting a "Failure when attempting to copy boot files" error. I am a little worried about experimenting as I could destroy my boot block on my windows 7 drive. I guess worse case I can change the boot order in the BIOS but it would be nice to do that with a boot menu.

Some of the windows 10 boot tutorials seemed to lead me to believe this option would be detected but I am gathering it would have happened if it was done on all the same drive. BTW these are SATA drives.

[#2]

I seen a few different ways to accomplish this. If you have two existing drives that each will boot up their version of the OS, what boots up by default with them in the system at the same time? That'll help you figure out the bootloader being used.

One option could be to look at something like  EasyBCD: https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/. I don't use this tool personally but have seen others leverage it.

[#3]

I did see suggestions for that product but I was trying to get a Microsoft solution. Windows 10 is my primary OS btw. I saw that Windows 10 had a nice UI for the boot screen and would love to get that to work.

Problem is that Microsoft doesn't realize is that a lot of us have old hard drives and it makes no sense to install Windows 10 on the same drive as our Windows 7 OS. Especially where the new drives are so much faster and saving our data from destruction increases exponentially.

[#4]

@peter_s 

Hi, 

Thank you for sharing. I was wondering if you could help me please.
I had 2 OS (W7 and W10) so I deleted W7 but it seems that I didn’t change correctly from where to boot first and now my laptop does not open, I would like to know if I can maybe from F8 or setup change the option to now boot from W10 please.

Thanks in advanced,

Kind reagrds,

Ivon