Windows 8 Problems

[Thorax_the_Impaler]

Hello everyone; and thank you for your time.

Recently I took it upon myself to try out Windows 8; having bashed on the OS so much and never really had a lot of facetime with it I figured this only fair. My PC was unable to virtualize it; so I installed it onto a box I use for software testing; henceforth I will refer to as the black tower. Windows 8 has left a less-than-stellar first impression. And not only for the reasons you may think.

The black tower's storage consists of two drives, one is a SATA drive (80GB) that has Windows XP and Backtrack 5 r3 dual booted on it, and an IDE drive (120GB) that up until I installed Windows 8 was completely unusable and unresponsive. A clean reformat fixed this; and I installed Windows 8 on that drive, not wanting to disturb the 80GB drive's setup. Everything works fine......except the 80GB drive.

Whether the Windows 8 drive (the 120GB one) is plugged in or not, the box refuses to boot the 80GB disk. The disk works just fine; it just won't boot past a very nice screen that insists Windows 8 cannot boot. I don't understand this as this drive was not touched during installation; at least not to my knowledge. I once managed (and I have no idea how) to boot into the XP partition with both drives connected, but the system crashed after getting to the desktop and since then the drive will not boot. I am able to manipulate files just fine, I just can't get the box to find the bootloader on the 80GB disk.

I was smart enough to backup the 80GB drive in the case I needed to reinstall everything but I'd really prefer not to do that and I'd rather not mess with the partitions (though I will if necessary). My question is, how can I fix this mess and what caused it?

 

[Tehporp]

I think it is potentially possible that the motherboard have UEFI Secure Boot on, so you may need to disable it to boot Linux/Windows XP as described in Opensuse Forum Thread.

 

[Joe C]

Whether the Windows 8 drive (the 120GB one) is plugged in or not, the box refuses to boot the 80GB disk. The disk works just fine; it just won't boot past a very nice screen that insists Windows 8 cannot boot.

Sounds like W8 took over the boot loader for your XP/Backtrack drive. When you installed W8, did you have the 80gb drive connected?.
If you did you might need to repair your bootloader for the 80gb drive. Try to fix the XP partition (MBR)first then reinstall the bootloader you used for Backtrack (GRUB?)and see if it recognizes XP and allows the dualboot for that. Then disconnect the 80gb drive and see if you can install/repair the W8 bootloader (BCD)for the 120 gb drive. That should install two separate boot loaders, one for each drive. I think Grub for the XP/Backtrack dual boot 80gb drive and Windows 8 on the 120 gb drive. You'll need to use one of the F keys during post to select which drive to boot into

 

[Thorax_the_Impaler]

That motherboard was manufactured years ago. I'm sure it doesn't have that UEFI secure boot. Yes, the 80GB was hooked up to the machine when I installed Windows 8 o the 120GB drive. I already tried rewriting the MBR on the 80GB drive and no luck. The weird thing is, the 120GB drive will boot just fine regardless of whether or not the 80GB drive is connected. Should I try to reinstall something?

 

[PP Mguire]

The only thing you can try and do is repair the XP install because installing Windows 8 overwrote the boot for the XP drive. Next time you are installing something, make sure the rest of the drives are unplugged.

 

[Thorax_the_Impaler]

The only thing you can try and do is repair the XP install because installing Windows 8 overwrote the boot for the XP drive. Next time you are installing something, make sure the rest of the drives are unplugged.

Yeah I did that. Never had that issue with any other OS. Balls.

 

[PP Mguire]

Yeah I did that. Never had that issue with any other OS. Balls.

Pretty much got lucky then, because in most all cases XP dominates and screws with newer boot loaders. It's common practice to just unplug your drives during install just to be on the safe side.

 

[Thorax_the_Impaler]

Pretty much got lucky then, because in most all cases XP dominates and screws with newer boot loaders. It's common practice to just unplug your drives during install just to be on the safe side.

Must have been luck; both my machines have multiple storage drives and this is the first time I've ever encountered that problem. I guess you learn something obvious everyday.

 

[PP Mguire]

This is also the first time you've used 8, correct? That's it right there. It's ok to install XP then 7 as it usually gives you a menu to select which OS.

 

[Joe C]

The 80 gb drive probably had a linux boot loader, and installing Windows 8 screwed that up. You can try to reload the linux boot loader and see if that works. I don't know which boot loader you have because I know there's a couple different boot loaders you can use for linux