Windows Vista Dual Booting Vista - Windows7

Working with a friend to establish a dual boot, Vista Home Basic and Windows 7 Ultimate on two separate hard drives.
Vista was the original OS in good working order, successfully installed Win 7 on the new hard drive and both operating systems work fine on there own (just one hard drive connected). However when connecting both drives, having installed "Easy BCD" only Windows 7 will boot.
When booting to Vista we would get the error regarding:

Windows cannot verify the digital signature for winload.exe

So far all attempts to fix this have failed unfortunately.
More googling has led me to a small program called "VISTA BOOT PRO" that sounds promising and I just wonder if any of the Experts here have any experience with this program in regards to solving the problem, or have any other fixes for it.

Somehow we don’t know how, we have managed to run the OS with a notice on the bottom right hand corner stating "Running in Test Modeâ€.
Any idea on how to get rid of that.

 

My suggestion would be to leave the boot files alone and when you wanted to boot to the other operating system, go into the BIOS and put that HDD before the other in the boot order. If you modify the boot files, there is the possibility that they will get corrupted and if you eventually want to remove one of the OSes, it might mean reformatting both.

When trialling Windows 7 Beta, I used that method. As soon as Win 7 Beta was no longer required, there was no problem concerning the boot files.

It sounds like Vista works successfully alone, so you might have to work on the Windows 7 HDD to make it boot separately, if you want to use this method.

After trying some "boot loaders" like you mention, I gave up and use the BIOS boot method. No more problems.

Matt

 

Hi Matt, thank you for the reply, and yes I do feel that way too, both Vista and 7 work fine on there own and like you mention we did not like the idea to play around with the Vista boot as it is his primary work station.
I will mention to him the way you suggest to select via the BIOS.
I will also try and get him to make an Image (Acronis) of his C drive and then maybe try that VISTA BOOT PRO program.
Thanks again Matt
hawk22

 

That's cool Hawk

I had a dual boot that worked absolutely perfectly for years, then when I wanted to get rid of one of the OSes, it was an absolute perfect NIGHTMARE

I'm glad the BIOS makers have caught up, I won't be using dual booting unless they can provide a perfect uninstall (when you want to go back to either one of the OSes singularly).

The BIOS boot option is my choice for the moment.

Matt