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Issues due to having two windows 8 installations - yes I am an idiot

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ppilot212

Junior Member
So I am building a new HTPC and was trying to speed up the process last night(all my remaining parts were coming in today and I will be out of town this weekend). Basically I was trying to use a move an old Vista installation over to an SSD drive and then upgrade to Windows 8 pro to get WMC. After having issues cloning the boot partition, I got the genius idea of just installing Vista from scratch using my new Windows 8 build. So I attached the new SSD, initalized it and started the installation without a problem. Everything went smoothly until the I upgraded the Vista Installation to Windows 8 pro (same as the existing OS on a different SSD), where I had to choose between the two at the booth screen and I chose the new installation to make sure WMC was ready to go.

Thinking all was fine, I shut down my computer and removed the SSD with the new Windows 8 pro install. Next startup my MB (P8Z77-V LK) didn't recognize my primary SSD (wasn't showing up in the SATA profile in the BIOS). After moving cables around to different SATA ports I was finally able to get to the boot screen.

However this is what I have to select every time.


I tried to do a repair and a refresh in the advanced options screen shown above and I got the following error.


So now I am at the point where I can access the the original windows 8 installation but it always goes to that OS selection screen and bootup in general is much slower then it used to be. From a hardware stand point I thought it was weird that some of my SATA ports would stop working and now when I shutdown, the power light stays on and the CPU fan keeps running.

Will I have to do a clean install to fix this? Thanks for any help!
 
You're not an idiot. My PC recently got completely borked by trying to do a dual Win7/Win8 boot install with two physically separate hard drives. The more I read into this, the more people I find are having similiar issues. I finally threw in the towel and just reinstalled Win7 and shelved my Win7 tablet (I mean Win8 🙂) disc.
 
NickelPlate said:
You're not an idiot. My PC recently got completely borked by trying to do a dual Win7/Win8 boot install with two physically separate hard drives. The more I read into this, the more people I find are having similiar issues. I finally threw in the towel and just reinstalled Win7 and shelved my Win7 tablet (I mean Win8 🙂) disc.
Click to expand...

There is an easy to do what you want: Install each OS on separate drives with only that drive connected/installed. Connect/install both drives. On boot, press whatever key your mobo uses to choose which drive to boot (usually F12). Voila! Dual-boot with no confusion. 🙂
 
AnonymouseUser said:
There is an easy to do what you want: Install each OS on separate drives with only that drive connected/installed. Connect/install both drives. On boot, press whatever key your mobo uses to choose which drive to boot (usually F12). Voila! Dual-boot with no confusion. 🙂
Click to expand...

That's precisely what I did but still had issues. IDK what went wrong.
 
Thanks for the advice!.... after messing around with this for a while I just decided to back everything up and do clean install. So far everything seems to be working fairly well. Lesson learned and hopefully the HTPC installation goes smooth.
 
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