Windows 7/Windows 8 Issues

[StuS]

I have a computer that has an SSD with Windows 7 on it as my primary drive. I have a second 2TB drive for storage, and I recently added a hard drive from an old laptop. I installed a fresh copy of Windows 8 onto the laptop harddrive and when it goes to boot it shows the initial loading screen, but before getting to the Bootloader menu the screen will go blank.

I figured it may be an incompatibility with my Windforce 7950. If I change the BIOS to force the iGPU to the primary display it will boot Windows 8 fine. I tried installing the latest Catalyst drivers for Windows 8 and went back to the BIOS and switched it back to PCI-E. No go.

Now I could live with switching to iGPU when I want to use Windows 8, but as soon as the laptop harddrive is plugged in, Windows 7 will not boot. It hangs at the boot logo and I get some visual artifacts until it restarts. It will not boot in safe mode. This is regardless of which graphics card is set as primary.

If I unplug the harddrive again (may require successfully booting Windows 8 as well) I can boot back into Windows 7 using either the iGPU or the PCI-E graphics card.

The laptop does have another partition, with an OS installed on it, but it is only as a backup from the laptop's data. The OS doesn't show up and is not currently bootable.

Ideally I want to use the BIOS to select which harddrive and OS to boot from, but I'll settle for having a bootloader if I can get it running with the harddrive connected.

I will take some pictures of the boot artifacts, I just wanted to get this posted before I locked myself out of the computer for a while.

Any ideas? I'd love to be able to put the side panel back on my case :)

[StuS]

Well a BIOS update (thought it didn't mention Win8 compatibility) fixed booting to Windows 8 and from there I was able to correct some errors on one of the hard drive partitions to be able to boot to Windows 7.

Motherboard is the Asus P8Z77-v Pro for reference.

[SubTract]

Easiest way is to put all appropriate hardware into the machine. Then do fresh installs. Switching hardware after installs always makes things a little more complicated. I would partition your SSD and dual boot from that. ditch the laptop drive and just go back to 2 drives. move all your data to your storage drive and just make sure you don't format it when installing windows.

[GoodBytes]

You know you can get an eSATA enclosure or docking tray (assuming your board has eSATA), and just plug your laptop HDD onto it. When you need it, just power it on, and the rest works like an USB drive.. just SATA performance. Or I guess you can buy a USB 3.0 docking tray, and use that.

[StuS]

Or I could leave it how it is and have an extra TB of storage space through old laptop drives as my storage drive is nearly full. I did do fresh installs. As updated, the BIOS was the culprit.

I don't want to partition the SSD. I don't know about the rest of you nerds, but 120GB is pushing it for me.

[StuS]

You know you can get an eSATA enclosure or docking tray (assuming your board has eSATA), and just plug your laptop HDD onto it. When you need it, just power it on, and the rest works like an USB drive.. just SATA performance. Or I guess you can buy a USB 3.0 docking tray, and use that.

I have a USB drive already and its always on. I'd prefer my drives to be in the tower, I had the enclosure in there for a while but I had debated taking it out of the external enclosure and installing it in the tower.

[SubTract]

Or I could leave it how it is and have an extra TB of storage space through old laptop drives as my storage drive is nearly full. I did do fresh installs. As updated, the BIOS was the culprit.

I don't want to partition the SSD. I don't know about the rest of you nerds, but 120GB is pushing it for me.

Thats what a storage drive is for. I have a 256GB ssd dual booting win7/8 and I've still got like 170GB free. :)

All my data goes onto storage HDD's and are backed up by my server.

120GB isn't much but think back to when there were 20MB and 40MB HDD's

120GB is loads for 2 OS' you can even share install directories between your OS'

For me my A: and C: are SSD with win 7 and win 8.

E: F: and G: are storage drives. All my programs go on E: and I use the same directory for 7 and 8.

Eg. stream installed on E:/steam

windows 8 updates steam when i go back to windows 7 I don't need to update because it already is.

I would turn off hibernate as it uses huge amounts of space. :)

[StuS]

Or I could leave it how it is and have an extra TB of storage space through old laptop drives as my storage drive is nearly full. I did do fresh installs. As updated, the BIOS was the culprit.

I don't want to partition the SSD. I don't know about the rest of you nerds, but 120GB is pushing it for me.

Actual storage is 111GB. I keep a few programs installed for faster access, but all my data and most of my programs and games are all on the storage drive. I'm sitting at 34GB free. I have my steam and games set up the same way.

[StuS]

Or I could leave it how it is and have an extra TB of storage space through old laptop drives as my storage drive is nearly full. I did do fresh installs. As updated, the BIOS was the culprit.

I don't want to partition the SSD. I don't know about the rest of you nerds, but 120GB is pushing it for me.

I already have hibernate turned off so I'm all good there.

Back when 20MB and 40MB HDDs existed the OS didn't take up 20-30GB of space :)

[SubTract]

Or I could leave it how it is and have an extra TB of storage space through old laptop drives as my storage drive is nearly full. I did do fresh installs. As updated, the BIOS was the culprit.

I don't want to partition the SSD. I don't know about the rest of you nerds, but 120GB is pushing it for me.

windows 7 will fit on 15 GB and 8 on 20. thats 35GB that still leaves 76GB. Programs; say office and photoshop/premier, web browser/s. say maybe 20GB being generous. that still leaves 56 GB that is more than half. I would download spacesniffer and see where all your space is being used.

[StuS]

Or I could leave it how it is and have an extra TB of storage space through old laptop drives as my storage drive is nearly full. I did do fresh installs. As updated, the BIOS was the culprit.

I don't want to partition the SSD. I don't know about the rest of you nerds, but 120GB is pushing it for me.

I have done that, your post the other day made me curious. This drive was in my laptop before and will be going back after I upgrade, so I have a few games I could move to the other drive. I did turn my pagefile on too, so 16GB for that. Guild Wars 2 is 15 and Ubisoft Game Launcher has a cache that is up to 6. iTunes is hogging up another 6 in my appdata. Might be time to do some cleaning.

[SubTract]

Or I could leave it how it is and have an extra TB of storage space through old laptop drives as my storage drive is nearly full. I did do fresh installs. As updated, the BIOS was the culprit.

I don't want to partition the SSD. I don't know about the rest of you nerds, but 120GB is pushing it for me.

How much RAM do you have and why a 16 GB page file? thats extreme. normally you have it a maximum of equal to the amount of RAM you have however that pretty much goes out the window once you hit 4GB. if you have 4GB of Ram just tick the box that says let windows handle it. if you have 8GB or more you can get away with turning it off although a lot of people don't recommend this. I would just set it to some small about like 300MB. an annoying but adverse affect to having a larger page file than having RAM means your computer will page files sooner than needed. which means its then slower storage rather than fast Memory. even though you have an SSD your RAM is still wayyyyy faster.

[StuS]

Or I could leave it how it is and have an extra TB of storage space through old laptop drives as my storage drive is nearly full. I did do fresh installs. As updated, the BIOS was the culprit.

I don't want to partition the SSD. I don't know about the rest of you nerds, but 120GB is pushing it for me.

I can't find where but I've read that even with over 8 GB of ram you should still have pagefile enabled. I used to run it without before with 8GB in the laptop and I was getting to the point of Windows shutting down programs.

[SubTract]

Or I could leave it how it is and have an extra TB of storage space through old laptop drives as my storage drive is nearly full. I did do fresh installs. As updated, the BIOS was the culprit.

I don't want to partition the SSD. I don't know about the rest of you nerds, but 120GB is pushing it for me.

Like I said a small page file should be enough. It really depends what you're running but 16GB page file is huge. Some programs actually require a page file to function properly. hence why you should have a little page file. Or you can just set windows to manage it and it will just give it self more if it needs it.