SOLVED Twisted Dual Boot

[jefboyardee]

Wanting Win10 to dual boot with my existing Win7, I made an ISO of Win10, then did a clean install on a separate partition. It, of course didn't show activation. So, instead, I launched Win7, inserted the ISO and did an update to Win10. I backed that up, then restored Win7. Then, on next boot, I restored Win10 to the separate partition.

At this point, the computer still booted to 7 and made no mention of this strange new OS. So I launched EasyBCD. It didn't show Win10 either so I entered it manually. It worked – boot now offers Windows 7 or Windows 10 and they both work! Not only that, they both show as activated. I didn't recall seeing this trick online so I here I am.

I'm writing this on Win7 because I still think it's better than 10. I also think that's pretty sad...

 

[jefboyardee]

That's it. Booted to W10 to do its updates, one monster installed. Booted back to w7, chkdsk interrupted and had to tweak something in every damn file. Then w7 would not get online even though it was connected, nothing worked right. It appears that the w10 updated futzed with my w7 setup. So I restored to a w7 disk that has no w10 partition installed, everything is fine again.

Not only do I have to avoid adopting w10 en toto, I can't even visit it on an adjacent partition.