Dual boot windows 8.1 and windows 8

[Aditya Chowdhury]

I've installed windows 8.1 preview on a fresh partition (so that I can use the stable win 8 install along with experimenting 8.1). But once installed, it doesn't display any boot menu. I know there is some simple trick using BCDedit to link my previous win8 install and add to the boot option but unfortunately after lots of Bing and Google I cant do it correctly. Anyone can help with a step-by-step guide?

 

[LMZR]

I thought Windows 8 had something where it would prevent you from dual booting.

I might be wrong though.

 

[Aditya Chowdhury]

Not so. when I had both 7 and 8 installed I could boot to either.

 

[_Emi_]

apparently it should work that way... I found this How to install the Win 8.1 alongside Windows 8 in dual-boot and they say it should appear once you restart your pc after installing win8.1.

now i have to ask, in advanced system settings, what do you have in start up and recovery? maybe for some reason, it has disabled the option for a display OSs menu.

one thing you could have done instead of installing it that way in a physical partition. you could also made a dual boot with native vhd
Native VHD Boot Windows 8.1 as Virtual Machine with Windows 7 | Next of Windows

but apparently as you can read in my first link, it should have worked as a normal dual boot, which is weird why you arent getting the win8 OS, and why BCDedit isnt working. hmm have you tried easybcd or something like that to make it easier to add the win8 OS in your boot menu?

 

[WindowsGuru]

You can try Dual-boot Repair tool for Windows 8.1.

1. Run "Automatic Repair" in either OS. This will make the latest OS boot by default
2. In latest OS (8.1) download and install Visual BCD Editor. Run.
3. In VBCD Editor type <F9>key. This will add Windows 8 if missing from boot menu.

If your installations are based on UEFI booting and GPT disk change path of Windows 8 loader from \windows\system32\winload.exe to path ending in .efi !

As I cannot post links (<less then 10 points) see on site "boyans dot net" for tools mentioned.
Hope this helps.