Pretty slow day today, no excitement, it’s dreary outside, and not much happened at work. The highlight of my day was when I had to manually add an entry to a windows 7 boot loader in order to dual boot to Windows. Here are the instructions to do so:
Note: you need to include the curly braces around the GUID.
1. Open up a command console in elevated mode.
2. Use the export command to make a backup before making any changes to the BCD store (Boot manager), for example:
bcdedit /export "E:\BCD Backup"
3. Type bcdedit in a command prompt to see a list of GUIDs.
4. Use this command to copy an existing operating system entry to a new entry and give it a name; I named it “Windows Vista” since that is the OS I want to load. This command will also return a new GUID which you will need for the rest of the commands:
bcdedit /copy {GuidToCopy} /d “Windows Vista”
5. Update the partition information for the new entry (using the GUID) by specifying the drive that contains the OS you want to load (replace x with the appropriate drive letter):
bcdedit /set {NewGuid} device partition=x:
bcdedit /set {NewGuid} osdevice partition=x:
6. Use the following command to display the new entry and make it the last entry on the boot menu (list of operating systems you will see when you turn the PC on) by entering:
bcdedit /displayorder {NewGuid} /addlast
Scenario which required the need to do so:
I had a laptop with Windows Vista installed on one of the two hard drives. I removed the drive with Vista installed on in, and proceeded to install Windows 7 Enterprise on the remaining empty drive. When I was done installing windows 7 and set it up to my liking, I then placed the drive with Vista installed back in the laptop. Now I needed to add an entry in the Windows 7 boot loader for Vista, since windows 7 did NOT get to do it auto-magically during its installation. Actually, Windows 7 would have left the Vista boot loader in place and added an entry for itself, which is NOT what I wanted. Removing the Vista drive allowed Windows 7 to create a separate boot partition, which is what I did want. Anyway, manually adding an entry to the boot loader is simple, but most might not like using the console.
You can find much more detail at Boot Configuration Data Editor Frequently Asked Questions