Having no fun with the Win 8.1 - call it downgrade. Had problems from the start. I've had Win 7 for some time. I bought Win 8 and an SSD and did an upgrade from 7-8 on the SSD with no problems using Paragon Migrate OS to SSD - worked very well. This left me with Win 7 on a 320 gig hard drive and Win 8 on an SSD. I didn't touch Win 7 after that until the Win 8.1 downgrade which left me with an unstable Win 8 OS. When trying to boot into 8.1 I was getting very slow response, odd startup of some programs, lockups, etc. I tried to run safe mode (recovery) in Win 8 to see what I could do to fix, but it was very hard to get into and not much use when I finally did. The last time I tried to get into safe mode in 8.1 the computer booted up into safe mode for Windows 7. Since then restarts are in Win 7, not 8. The boot into 7 rearranged the drive letters and the Win 8 SSD became an NTFS (Healthy active, primary partition), no boot, page file, etc. C: = Win 7, E: = Win 8. Since then I have not tried to start Win 8 - not sure how. (See attachment).
To make a long story short, having Win 7 available has been really helpful. I would like to keep it available and updated while also having Win 8 as an option.
Is there a decent start-up software for choosing which system to boot up?
Is there a way for me to repair Win 8 (disk E) so that it is bootable?
The third question is whether or not I can boot up a Linux OS (Cinnamon) onto a partition on a disk and play around with it - with the same boot up software?
Perhaps a related problem was that an external storage drive had some how become unusable during the upgrade - since repaired with chkdsk /f (Gparted error log attached). I don't know if this was the primary reason that Win 8 was running so poorly. Before it was repaired it showed as a Raw disk J: and E: Win 8 disk was not shown in Computer or Disk Management. When J: was shut down E: became visible again. All disk show now that J: was fixed with chkdsk.
Would really appreciate some help with this.
Thanks
To make a long story short, having Win 7 available has been really helpful. I would like to keep it available and updated while also having Win 8 as an option.
Is there a decent start-up software for choosing which system to boot up?
Is there a way for me to repair Win 8 (disk E) so that it is bootable?
The third question is whether or not I can boot up a Linux OS (Cinnamon) onto a partition on a disk and play around with it - with the same boot up software?
Perhaps a related problem was that an external storage drive had some how become unusable during the upgrade - since repaired with chkdsk /f (Gparted error log attached). I don't know if this was the primary reason that Win 8 was running so poorly. Before it was repaired it showed as a Raw disk J: and E: Win 8 disk was not shown in Computer or Disk Management. When J: was shut down E: became visible again. All disk show now that J: was fixed with chkdsk.
Would really appreciate some help with this.
Thanks
