Problem with Windows 8, and adding a second hard drive with Windows 7 installed on it

[RDSport323]

Let me explain my situation... Recently, my parents purchased a dell xps computer over black friday, which came pre-loaded with Windows 8.. I hate windows 8.. but that's besides the point. This dell was supposed to replace an older inspiron that had Windows 7 installed on it...

So, what I wanted to do was basically take the hard drive out of the older inspiron with windows 7 and connect it to my newer dell xps that has windows 8 already installed.

So after plugging the hard drive in, windows 8 goes into a "Preparing Windows Repair" or something like that and gets stuck there for hours. I unplug the Win 7 hard drive and it boots normally. So I did some research and I found out it has somethign to do with the UEFI boot thing..

I'm not trying to dualboot, although that would be nice.. The main objective is to just be able to have both hard drives working in the computer so that I can access files on both drives without any hassle.

Sometimes if I reset the computer enough times, the computer actually lets me bypas the repair screen and it boots up like normal, but then it messes up when I reboot the computer.

Any help would be appreciated.. This is so annoying.

 

[jolancer]

not sure why thats happening, havnt used win8 an dont plan to but, my guess is this will probably fix the issue if you dont want to wipe out windows 7, this way you can also revert the w7 boot partition ID back to whatever it was and it will function like normal.

http://forums.justlinux.com/showthread.php?149828-Hidden-partitions-tips

...... in short: boot from a live linux distro and use these cmds..
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

...... List partitions (find the 100mb win7 boot partition to hide)
...... [its a lower case -L) linux is case sensitive
$ sfdisk -l

...... example print the id of a partition
$ sfdisk --print-id /dev/sda 3

...... example change partition id to ntfs Hidden
$ sfdisk --change-id /dev/sda 3 17

 

[ViRGE]

I'm not sure why UEFI would be interfering here. It sounds like it's just trying to boot off of the Win7 drive, in which case you just need to manually select the Win8 drive.

 

[cvmmcg2]

Let me explain my situation... Recently, my parents purchased a dell xps computer over black friday, which came pre-loaded with Windows 8.. I hate windows 8.. but that's besides the point. This dell was supposed to replace an older inspiron that had Windows 7 installed on it...

So, what I wanted to do was basically take the hard drive out of the older inspiron with windows 7 and connect it to my newer dell xps that has windows 8 already installed.

So after plugging the hard drive in, windows 8 goes into a "Preparing Windows Repair" or something like that and gets stuck there for hours. I unplug the Win 7 hard drive and it boots normally. So I did some research and I found out it has somethign to do with the UEFI boot thing..

I'm not trying to dualboot, although that would be nice.. The main objective is to just be able to have both hard drives working in the computer so that I can access files on both drives without any hassle.

Sometimes if I reset the computer enough times, the computer actually lets me bypas the repair screen and it boots up like normal, but then it messes up when I reboot the computer.

Any help would be appreciated.. This is so annoying.

You will either have to change BIOS to Legacy each time you boot 7 or reinstall 7 using UEFI to have them play together.