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From: kitekrazy on 16 Feb 2010 18:11
On 2/16/2010 6:46 AM, John Braner wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just thought I'd share some more fun I had with Windows 7 dual booting
> yesterday. I'm not talking about the Microsoft dual booting - I'm
> talking about booting one windows partition and hiding the other (one or
> two).
>
> I'm using the Acronis OSS (Operating System Selector) which doesn't
> really support Windows 7 - so that doesn't help.
>
> Windows 7 seems to be *really* eager to see all the partitions on your
> PC, no matter what *you* want. I would suggest that any time you change
> anything with your dual boot partitions, that you deactivate your boot
> manager, and manually use your favorite utility and make one Win 7
> partition active - and then hide all the rest. Then you can use the Win
> 7 DVD to "repair" your partition to boot properly.
>
> Windows 7 uses a command line utility called BCDEDIT, and when things
> are set up correctly, it seems to be set to boot from "C:" rather than
> is disk1/partition0 etc (like in boot.ini on XP). Whenever there are
> references to a disk or partition in BCDEDIT (just type BCDEDIT from a
> command line to see how it's set up) - that seems to mean that Win 7 has
> found some other partitions that you want to be "hidden" - and is
> sticking it's nose into them.
>
> I had a situation where *all* my Windows partitions (2 x Windows 7 and
> one XP) were hidden, so Win 7 just sat and stared at me trying to boot.
> It seems to be able to see c:\boot even on a hidden partition, so it can
> *begin* to boot, and read it's config files - but then it stalls when
> it's not happy.
>
> So inshort - if you're having problems setting up a boot manager with
> Windows 7:
>
> - disable your boot manager temporarily
> - use your favorite disk manager, booting from CD, to set one active
> partition and hide the rest
> - use the Windows 7 DVD to "repair" the partition and make it bootable
> - repeat for each partition
> - then enable your boot manager and try to get it to boot each partition
> in turn.
>
> Is anyone having any luck with a boot manager with Windows 7? EasyBCD?
> anything else?
>

I had problems with this once. One work around is to remove all
additional drives. This seems to be only a problem with SATA drives.
EasyBCD was the fix.
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