James Bannan20 January 2009, 12:00 PM
Got your hands on the Windows 7 beta and want to dual boot it alongside Windows Vista? Here's our step-by-step tutorial to get you up and running with Microsoft's latest OS.
Page 4 - Managing the Bootloader
Once Windows 7 is installed and the system reboots, you’ll be presented with a boot menu with two options: “Windows 7” and "Windows Vista”.
Windows Vista and Windows 7 use the same bootloader, so the Windows 7 boot entry is an addition to the existing bootloader rather than a replacement as with a Windows XP dualbooting scenario.
This makes life pretty easy - Vista and windows 7 and perfectly happy to co-exist. Having said that, they do read the bootloader slightly differently.
Boot into Vista and launch a command prompt (Start, All Programs, Accessories, Command Prompt). If UAC is turned on (and even if you're an Administrator), right-click Command Prompt and select "Run as administrator". In the command window, type in BCDEDIT and press Enter.
Vista references the Windows 7 partition in the bootloader as a mapped drive. For comparison, reboot the system and boot into Winndows 7. Open an admin command prompt and run BCDEDIT.
As you can see, Windows 7 references the Windows Vista partition a bit differently - it uses the logical path rather than a drive mapping. This doesn't represent a problem between the system - it's just different. The one implication is that if you change the drive letter of the Windows 7 partition in Windows Vista, the entry in the bootloader will be incorrect and Windows 7 won't load.
To make changes to the bootloader in either system you can use EasyBCD, which we've used in most of our dualbooting tutorials. It's probably fine in this case too, but as EasyBCD doesn't recognise the full physical paths which Windows 7 makes use of in the bootloader, we're just going to use the BCDEDIT utility rather than risk damaging the system.
the first thing to do is to make a backup of the bootloader configuration - this is easily restored if anything goes wrong. Type in the following command:
bcdedit /export PATH:\FILENAME
If you need to restore the bootloader, use the /import switch instead of /export.
To delete an entry in the bootloader, for example if you want to remove the entry for Windows 7 and stop dualbooting, you need to identify it first.
Run BCDEDIT and look for the identifier value for the Windows 7 entry, then type in the following command:
bcdedit /delete [identifier] /cleanup
This will remove the relevant entry - reboot and the system will boot into the one remaining OS. You can then use GPartEd, DISKPART or the Disk Management utility to delete the partition and extend the system partition to take over the space.