Dual Boot Selection with two SSD Installed

I have two SAMSUNG SSD's installed in the W540.
SSD #1 -- Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
SSD #2 -- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate
The SSD's had a complete install of each Microsoft Windows operating system without using the dual boot manager. I select teh SSD to boot from by using teh F12 key at boot time.
On my previous computer (HP EliteBook Workstation 8560w), the BIOS had a option to display a boot selection menu for me to select from without having to manually select the option to display. The boot selection menu gave me 20-30 seconds to select a alternative boot option. If I did not respond it woudl boot to the primary drive.
Can the Lenovo W540 be setup the same way? I can find no options in the latest BIOS.

I am honestly dubious that your previous HP machine had anything in the BIOS to provide this "Boot Manager" functionality you've described. Your description is exactly what Boot Manager in Windows does, which probably what was in effect on your HP machine.
Now you say you installed two separate versions of Windows on two separate drives, and without involving Windows Boot Manager. That suggests to me that you unplugged the other SSD when you did each install, so that the Windows installer didn't even know about the other bootable OS when doing its current install. If it had seen the other pre-existing bootable Windows, then the second install would have triggered the creation of a 2-OS boot menu (identical to what you say you saw on your old HP machine). You could still have two bootable Windows, on two separate drives (or, you could also have installed to two separate partitions on one drive if you wanted to), and at boot time Boot Manager would present the menu to you and you'd select one or the other. The most recent Windows to get installed would probably have made itself the "default", so that after 10-30 seconds it would auto-boot to that Windows if you didn't arrow up/down and press ENTER to select the other Windows for this particular boot.
The BIOS of the machine has a "boot sequence" setup, and one of your two SSD drives MUST be first, in front of the other. So at boot time by default (in the absence of F12 to select a boot device) the BIOS would normally go to THAT "first" drive in the boot sequence list, locate the "active" partition on that drive (where Boot Manager is assumed to live), and start the boot process. If Boot Manager sees a 1-OS boot menu, it just goes to that partition (as C, where Windows lives on that drive) and starts Windows. If a 2-OS boot menu exists, Boot Manager presents it to you and you decide which Windows you want to boot to.
When you push F12 at boot time, you simply say to the BIOS "let me pick which of my drives I want you to go to, to then find the "active" partition on that drive to kick off the boot process". Since you did two completely independent Windows installs, I would say that you probably have a "system reserved" partition (which is marked "active") on each SSD, along with a C system partition (for Windows) on each SSD. So you can actually boot to either drive, via F12, or you can just let the machine boot to whichever one you know to be first in the boot sequence list.
But... if you'd simply installed your second Windows to the second SSD while the first Windows/SSD was still cabled and visible, the second Windows install would have done everything you're now asking to be done. The existing 1-OS boot menu (on the first SSD) would have been seen and updated by the Windows installer, to add the second Windows to the menu which would thus now be a 2-OS boot menu. The second Windows would get installed wherever you wanted it to get installed (i.e. to the second SSD), and all would be well with the world.
Note that had this taken place, no second "system reserved" partition (marked "active", and housing the second copy of Boot Manager) would have been created on the second SSD with the second installed Windows. The existing "system reserved" (marked "active", and living on the first drive in the BIOS boot sequence list) would simply have had its boot menu updated from 1-OS to 2-OS, and you'd be home free right now.
This is exactly how Boot Manager works. I'm sure your old HP machine had such a setup, with your two Windows installed sequentially over time, and with the second one recognizing the first one's existence and adding itself to the boot menu to produce a 2-OS boot menu which is what you saw. That wasn't from the BIOS. It was from Windows Boot Manager handling a 2-OS boot menu.
So, what can you do now? Well, technically, you only need one "active" partition (i.e. "system reserved", where Boot Manager lives) on the first SSD in your BIOS boot sequence list. You won't need the second "system reserved" which in my opinion was probably created (unnecessarily) when you did your second Windows install with the first SSD temporarily disconnected.
But the goal here is to get the 1-OS boot menu that's on the first SSD "system reserved" partition updated, to add the second Windows on the second SSD, producing a 2-OS boot menu. And to do that you can use a wonderful 3rd-party product named EasyBCD. It is a tool to maintain your boot menu, and you can manually do things after-the-fact (like now) which you should have done before, or simply to perform maintenance or changes.
So, with both SSD's cabled and operational (your current booted Windows will appear as C, and probably your other drive's Windows partition will thus appear as D to the current booted Windows), you run EasyBCD. It really doesn't matter which Windows is on the first SSD and that is first in the BIOS boot sequence, only that it will be the boot menu in the "system reserved" partition on that drive which will be manipulated by EasyBCD to become the 2-OS menu. You can make either Windows the default (which will auto-boot in 10 seconds if you don't select the other Windows), no matter which SSD it's on.
You can view the current boot menu (from the currently booted Windows) via EDIT. You pick which entry is to be the "default".
To add a new entry to the boot menu, push the ADD button and navigate to the drive (D) the Windows to be added lives on.
If you don't already have same, I would recommend you have a "system image" backup of both of your bootable Windows drives (to an external USB 3.0 drive, ideally), so that if you're skittish about doing this you'll at least be able to quickly and easily restore what you currently have from your backups.
But believe me, EasyBCD can be trusted to do exactly what you want to do... which is to create a 2-OS boot menu on your first drive's "system reserved" partition. This 2-OS boot menu will name BOTH of your two bootable Windows, from your two SSD drives. You won't need to push F12 to select the boot device, just let the machine go to the first drive in the boot sequence and kick off Boot Manager, and the rest will behave exactly as you are now seeking.
Let me know if you have questions. And for sure, let us know how it turns out.

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Dual boot setup with two hard drives

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OK, here's mine for comparison:
ibook:~ michaelc$ bless --info /Volumes/*
finderinfo[0]: 3040 => Blessed System Folder is /Volumes/OS9.2/System Folder
finderinfo[1]: 0 => No Startup App folder (ignored anyway)
finderinfo[2]: 0 => Open-folder linked list empty
finderinfo[3]: 3040 => OS 9 blessed folder is /Volumes/OS9.2/System Folder
finderinfo[4]: 0 => Unused field unset
finderinfo[5]: 0 => No OS 9 + X blessed X folder
64-bit VSDB volume id: 0x233F23EAA912CD05So it would appear this might be the problem, since you don't have a "OS 9 blessed folder".
Now, I have never had to do this, but have seen it work for others. The bless command has a lot of options, many of which we don't want here. But let's give this a try. Remember, copy and paste this command into a text editor (TextEdit will do). Then edit the command to put your volume name in it (in place of <yourvolumename>, without the angle brackets), and copy and paste again into Terminal.
You will need to be logged in to an 'admin' account:
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Unable to install windows 7 and fedora in a dual boot even with windows 8 and fedora also

Unable to install fedora in dual boot please help me to install, is my system supports windows 7 or not with fedora or windows 8.1 with fedora please help me i need very urgent installation of fedora

Hi @siddu007 ,
Thank you for visiting the HP Support Forums and Welcome. I have looked into your issue about your HP 15-r262tu Notebook and issues with Dual booting Fedora. Here is the support site for Linux for troubleshooting.
Here is a link to Microsoft on your Downgrade Rights. Some features will not be available in a different OS.
Thanks.
Please click “Accept as Solution ” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.
Click the “Kudos, Thumbs Up" on the bottom to say “Thanks” for helping!

Can Tiger run a dual boot system with the two internal hard drives

Can Mac run a dual boot system with the two internal hard drives both running Tiger?
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I got my W540 recently with windows 8.1 pro on it. but as all engineers worst nightmare windows 8 has hard time with engineering softwares (for my case TIA Portal for PLC programming software which only support windows 7). so i need to have a windows 7. i prefer to keep my windows 8 and have dual boot system with windows 7 added. But i can't install windows 7. initially due to disk type (GPT), then i changed it to MBR without losing my files (which only was possible if i had deleted the recovery partition- now my recovery is on my flash drive). But there are already 4 partitions on the system (1 for C: drive and 3 for recovery and system files which came originally with the product) , how can i install a windows 7? i can't add another partition because that makes my disk a Dynamic disk (which i don't really know what is). all in all, i really need windows 7 on my system ASAP. If anyone know how to fix this please reply. Thanks guys.
Solved!
Go to Solution.

You are limited to four PRIMARY partitions on an MBR disk.
But other than the "active" partition (i.e. the small 100MB "system reserved" partition where Boot Manager is placed from doing a cold Windows install on an empty drive, or the 1.4GB equivalent Boot Manager partition that Lenovo provides along with other tools and utilities), all other partitions on the drive can be "logical". They are not required to be PRIMARY, although Lenovo delivers its partitions that way. But you can change that.
You can have up to 120 LOGICAL partitions on a drive (all of which live inside an originally PRIMARY partition which gets converted to an "extended partition" which houses all of the logical partitions. So if you have at least one logical partition (and thus have to give up one primary partition in order to build that required "extended partitions"), that means you can have up to three remaining primary partitions and up to 120 logical partitions... all on an MBR disk. No "dynamic", and no GPT.
Yes, that means even the Windows system partition itself (i.e. "C") can be on a LOGICAL partition. It's only that one "active" partition (where the BIOS goes to find Boot Manager and its menu, and kick off the rest of the system boot process) which truly must be PRIMARY. That's the only requirement.
So, if you want to use MiniTool's Partition Wizard to carve out sufficient free space for your second Windows 7 partition (by shrinking your existing Win8 partition), you can create one or more logical partitions inside that new free space, and do the Win7 install to one of those empty logical partitions. You can then use a second logical partition in that same free space for "data", if you want.
Note that Partition Wizard can even convert one of your existing primary partitions to logical (i.e. convert it to an "extended partition", inside of which will be then be the original primary partition now converted to logical). You can then shrink or move/resize the partitions on the drive (both primary and logical) however you want, to perhaps make room for additional "logical" partitions inside of that now present "extended partition" which can hold up to 120. You can even convert ALL of your primary partitions except for the one "active" partition (which MUST BE PRIMARY) to logical partitions, which gives you maximum flexibility in having even more than just two bootable OS's along with one or more data partitions, etc., up to 120 logical partitions... plus the one "active" primary Boot Manager "system reserved" partition which must be kept.

Can I dual boot Mac with Windows?

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Hi!
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Hi, Matt -
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<hr>
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My late 2012 mac mini boots slow with new ssd drive

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Yes, my solution fixed the issue. I went from a 47 to 53 second boot time to a 17 second boot time. The ssd drive is significantly faster than the original drive that came with my late 2012 mac-mini. This is my first post and I wasn't sure how to post this as a tip. I have another tip regarding usb 3.0 hubs.

[SOLVED] Dual booting arch onto an SSD that already has W7 in MBR?

I currently have windows 7 64bit installed onto a 256gb m4 SSD. I would like to be able to dual-boot W7 and Archlinux, but so far I've been getting wildly varying accounts of doom and data deletion from every source that I've looked at- and unfortunately, the Archwiki's guide to dualbooting is out of date.
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Finally... pulling all this together is the largest issue.
Do any of you know good, factual resources where I can look into this stuff?
Last edited by ilar (2013-04-03 03:53:31)

1) If you knew what UEFI was you should have known it wasn't an option, and shouldn't have asked about it.
2) (G)parted and gdisk (if you go with GPT at some point) handle SSD sector alignment automatically, and have for some time. A google search could have revealed that.
3) Whether one uses an SSD or HDD, dual-booting will be the same: 2+ partitions devoted to separate operating systems. While SSDs and HDDs may be fundamentally different constructs, booting from them is not different at all. That's why you aren't finding anything saying such.
4) As for the wiki being out-of-date, the specific reason (as stated page's in the header) is that GRUB legacy is no longer officially supported in Arch. Disregard that information and use GRUB2/Syslinux/LILO and the process remains the same: Install the operating systems side-by-side and chainload the secondary OS. It doesn't matter one bit: I've dual-booted every Linux distro I've used over the past four years with Windows, from Ubuntu to Mint to SuSE to Sabayon to Arch to whatever, and I've done it all the exact same way, using HDDs and an SSDs and both in combination. There's plenty of information out there on this, and your time could better have been spent looking it up rather than arguing with people here.
5) Welcome to Arch.

How to set time in Dual-boot config with Windows 8.1

Hi,
I have been trying to workaround this problem i am having with Arch linux and Windows 8.1 time settings.
According to Installation guide on Wiki I set hardware clock to UTC and added my local time zone too.
But my Windows 8.1 uses hardware clock a local time and it is really confusing me.
I did tried to setup Windows 8.1 to use UTC (http://superuser.com/questions/494432/f … bios-clock)
but that settings is not working on my side (most Windows 8.1 users are also getting the same problem)
Please help.

I have two laptops which are dual booted arch and Windows 8.1. For both of those machines I set the Windows clock to be UTC instead of local using the method in https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ti … in_Windows (i.e. creating the .reg file and executing it - take care that the .reg file is created correctly with the .reg extension or it won't execute). I still allow Windows 8.1 to update its time from the network and it does not cause a problem, though the advice is to let Arch do the time synchronisation. (That may be because it is not yet summertime so I will also disable time sync in Windows before the change to summertime at the end of this month). I also followed the normal install advice for Arch and have the hardware clock in UTC, and have chrony set up to keep time in sync. Additionally I use KDE and have my normal timezone with DST adjustments for summertime. I have not had any problem with that way of working on either of my two machines.
I presume that if the Windows clock registry hack is done after the dual boot install it should not matter but I made that change before installing Arch.
Last edited by mcloaked (2014-03-21 10:46:04)

Is there any possible way I can dual boot Windows with OSX 10.7.2 on a MacBook Pro 15' from 2006?

Hello,
I am new to this forums.
I have searched about dual boot win/mac, but couldn't find a clear answer, so I decided to post this now.
I run a MacBook Pro 15' from 2006 (Intel based) and have upgraded it to OSX 10.7.2 Lion.
I have tried to install windows 7 on a small (20GB) partition by using Bootcamp, but then I've received a notice saying that there was no windows support software available. However, I did install Windows 7 Professional by unchecking that box. After the installation I have downloaded the windows support software and tried to install it but then I've received a notice saying that I can't install it on this machine.
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Thanks.

This problem has been solved as I just needed to download Boot Camp 4.
Can I delete this post?

Boot Problem with new SSD Drive on CQ60-409SA

I have just replaced my HDD with a new Sandisk 120GB Extreme 11 SSD.
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Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am very pleased with the performance increase the SSD drive gives to Windows and Boot itme except for having to boot twice.
Best regards,
This question was solved.
View Solution.

No worries.
What year model is your notebook?
About your request for the Advanced options, unfortunately that is not possible with a BIOS supplied by HP.
You can, if you don't mind taking the risk, go to a BIOS Mod forum and look for a modified BIOS for your notebook there. The modified BIOS will have advanced options.
Have you tried the Solution and Update finder on the Support download drivers page for your notebook? It says that it will find missing drivers.
****Please click on Accept As Solution if a suggestion solves your problem. It helps others facing the same problem to find a solution easily****
2015 Microsoft MVP - Windows Experience Consumer

Dual Boot Selection with two SSD Installed

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