How do I repair my dual boot windows 7 and windows 8 bootloader?

Question

I had my laptop running both Windows 7 and Windows 8 as a dual boot. When I would start it, it would show the nice OS selection screen.

Then, I reinstalled Windows 7. What happens now is that when I start my laptop, there's no OS selection screen, it loads Windows 7 right away.

The Windows 8 partition is still there, I can see it in My PC, so I guess it's a matter of fixing the dual boot. However I can't find how to do that in this case.

How do I repair my dual boot windows 7 and windows 8 bootloader?

Solution

Get a WinPE boot disk or a MSDaRT boot disk and use BCDEdit. It's a command-line tool for managing BCD stores. It can be used for all kinds of stuff, including creating new stores, modifying existing stores, adding boot menu options, and for fixing stuff like this. BCDEdit is like Bootcfg.exe on earlier versions of Windows but better.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709667(v=ws.10).aspx

Comments

[Albert]

But if my system is loading fine Windows 7, do I need a boot disk? Can't I just use the BCDEdit tool?

[Ramhound]

You need to repair the WIndows 8 bootloader, use WINPE to do this.

[Yorkziea]

After you install an earlier Windows version in dual boot, booting to later Windows version is messed up. Read what OP says first then write/post. Nothing to do with timeout! So -1.