Got another problem would like help with. And yes, I have Googled.
Gave up trying to get this PC to dual boot Win10 and Win7. Win7 is on its own SSD. Win10 on a new SSD and using EFI boot.
So decided to install that Win7 SSD on another older machine that has Win10 running on the older boot system. Expecting the usual problems with windows seeing a hardware change. This older machine was already running dual boot - Win10 and XP. Have got it all working using EasyBCD. But I'm not seeing the Win10 'select an OS page' at start up, but the older text only page.
I'm very confused about all this works too. All three HDs would have been driveC originally. With them all installed, Win10 assigns different drive letters to the other two HDs. Load Win7. and it does the same - but different letters. Load XP, and the same happens. I've no idea how Easy BCD sorts this out.
Look in your "bcdedit" enumeration output. In administrator command prompt, try:
bcdedit
There will probably be a line with "displaybootmenu" in it, which gives the traditional black window with text.
This is how you add the black window with text.
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu True
Which suggests maybe something like
bcdedit /clear {bootmgr} displaybootmenu
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu False
Since you can enumerate right afterwards with
bcdedit
you can see immediately, what came of the commands.
*******
If you were to use the Macrium CD and the boot repair in its menu, that also removed the displaybootmenu line.
If you were having trouble installing Windows 7 for some reason, you have the option of cloning the partition over to the Win10 disk drive. Then, add it to boot with EasyBCD, or the Macrium CD and its boot repair (which will rebuild the BCD).
That's how I got Windows 7 on my 24 partition GPT drive. Just cloned it over, wired up the boot manager for it as Win10 was already there. Win10 was installed conventionally, and Win7 was added as "Accessory Luggage".
One thing to note:
The black page with text, is chain loading. It does not care what the last OS booted was. You select an OS and (chain) loading starts immediately.
The tile based fancy GUI menu, is not chain load. You will hear the BIOS beep and the machine will go through POST a second time, if you select the non-default OS. Thus the tile based fancy GUI is a loser. This is one reason I have the black page with text loaded on mine. Efficiency.
I have many OSes on the disk drive.
Step:
1) Power computer
2) Press F8 (Asus) for popup boot
3) Select "Ubuntu", presented with a dozen or more Linux OSes in a GRUB window.
Select "Windows Boot Manager", get the black page with text. Cursor to Win7, hit return, Win7 boots directly (chainload).
This is all possible, because the disk is GPT partitioned and has lots of room for partitions. Unlike with MSDOS partitioning, where all the fun would be happening in a huge collection of Extended-Logical. With a traditional setup, GRUB would run the show, and Windows would be an item in it. GRUB would also be easier to damage on an MSDOS setup. Whereas GPT, many times I've upgraded Win10 without screwing up the GRUB entry. Each one has its own folder in the ESP partition, and there is no good excuse for one procedure, to be altering the folder owned by the second ecosystem.
Not everything will stay in a Ubuntu ESP folder. Some Linux OSes could insist on creating yet another folder. I can't really be sure how GRUB works, and in multiboot, there are always surprises when something updates. Every time a kernel version changes in there, something hits the fan.
Multiboot is its very own "skill testing question". You'll become an expert, whether you wanted to or not.
Spoke too soon. Today, it booted straight into Win10 without showing the black page. I don't understand how Easy BCD works - it seems to write to each boot file on every HD.
So I changed the BIOS to boot from the Win7 SSD. And there was the black page with the choices, all of which load the OS you select.
Tried it a few times during the day and seems to be solid. So with no understanding of what's happening, will just leave it as is. ;-)
Only minor niggle is the black page has the OS not in the order my OCD wants, (goes Win7, Win10, Win XP top to bottom) but that's OK as it boots from Win10 if you do nothing.
You can get "bcdedit" to tell you about the menu stored in any BCD file. Without arguments, bcdedit will likely be looking in C:\boot\BCD .
bcdedit /store C:\boot\BCD # Look in the OS partitions, not the data ones... bcdedit /store D:\boot\BCD bcdedit /store E:\boot\BCD
If you have two hard drives, you can do BIOS directed boot, and select OSes on the various hard drives. This is how you can have "two different results" while booting - it's done by the BIOS being inconsistent about which disk it selects.
When you do that, you could be accessing the BCD on a different drive letter, in which case, the presence of the black screen, the listing of boot candidates, can be different.
It's possible, if you dump the current menu, you'll see that the printout in Command Prompt, roughly follows the menu entries in the black window. Could you change the ordering ? I presume so, but I've not wasted the time trying it :-) I'm not one of those people who "makes everything pretty" on a computer. I'm pretty lazy.
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