Upgrading Win 8.1 on a Dual-boot Machine

Can I safely upgrade the Win 8.1 partition of my dual-booting PC, or
will the installation want the entire HD?

Thanks.

Alek wrote:
Can I safely upgrade the Win 8.1 partition of my dual-booting PC, or
will the installation want the entire HD?

Thanks.

An *Upgrade* install, installs within the existing C: partition.
Windows becomes Windows.old. A new Windows directory is created.
Things are imported from the old setup. You'll need at least 20GB
of space (roughly). If you do "powercfg -h off" as administrator,
that removes the hiberfile, and makes a bit more room for an
upgrade install.

You may see a 450MB Recovery partition being created by the
install. I don't have a feeling for whether the installer
will go to great lengths to make partitions for itself
(change a primary to extended/logical, and do stuff in
logical partitions if needed).

Standard advice is to back up the target disk.

If by dual boot, you have one hard drive with Windows 7
and one hard drive with Windows 8.1 and Linux, you could
always unplug the Windows 7 drive before the installation
begins. And backup the combo Win8.1/Linux drive for safe
keeping. By not leaving extraneous disks present, that
reduces the odds the installer will overwrite the
wrong MBR.

While Win10 can be rolled back within 30 days of upgrade
installation, the rollback doesn't work properly. The
system will not be exactly as you left it. It is for this
reason, more than on other OSes, that a backup is required.
If you expect to safely roll back a Win10 upgrade, a
backup/restore is the way to do it.

The few test installs I've tried (like, during Preview era),
the installer was very good at "coloring inside the lines".
It didn't tend to go on a rampage. But then, I wasn't mixing
Linux GRUB and Win10 on the same hard drive. You may be able
to cook up a combo it doesn't like. And a backup is the
best thing to have for such situations (unknown outcome).

If you did have Linux GRUB, you could make a backup of the
MBR sector right now, and then you can repair damage to the
MBR from a Windows install. That's the only thing that
needs to be protected.

I can't even test all the things I'd like to test here,
because in certain situations I can't get the "Skip" button
to appear, and I cannot get past the license key prompt. On
Win8/8.1. I had a few "install-only" keys that I could use.
But so far, nothing that works is available for Win10.
There are a few web sites pushing the "wrong" keys,
and it greatly annoys me that the idiots running the
sites cannot make a fresh notation that the keys don't work.

The purpose of install-only keys, is for IT people to
install and fool around with the OS, before giving it
to an end customer. So I presume there are keys like
that out there, but so far, nothing is showing up
in a search. I even went back to the German site that
gave me my Win8.1 key, and no new entries have appeared
there.

Paul

Thanks, Paul.

Paul wrote on 10/22/2015 8:27 PM:
Alek wrote:
Can I safely upgrade the Win 8.1 partition of my dual-booting PC, or
will the installation want the entire HD?

Thanks.

An *Upgrade* install, installs within the existing C: partition.

I downloaded the Media Creation Tool and made a flash drive. That will
give me an upgrade installation, right?


Windows becomes Windows.old. A new Windows directory is created.
Things are imported from the old setup. You'll need at least 20GB
of space (roughly). If you do "powercfg -h off" as administrator,
that removes the hiberfile, and makes a bit more room for an
upgrade install.

You may see a 450MB Recovery partition being created by the
install. I don't have a feeling for whether the installer
will go to great lengths to make partitions for itself
(change a primary to extended/logical, and do stuff in
logical partitions if needed).

Standard advice is to back up the target disk.

Clone? Image?

If by dual boot, you have one hard drive with Windows 7
and one hard drive with Windows 8.1 and Linux,

One HD, multiple partitions.

While Win10 can be rolled back within 30 days of upgrade
installation, the rollback doesn't work properly. The
system will not be exactly as you left it. It is for this
reason, more than on other OSes, that a backup is required.
If you expect to safely roll back a Win10 upgrade, a
backup/restore is the way to do it.

Suggested tool?

The few test installs I've tried (like, during Preview era),
the installer was very good at "coloring inside the lines".
It didn't tend to go on a rampage. But then, I wasn't mixing
Linux GRUB and Win10 on the same hard drive. You may be able
to cook up a combo it doesn't like. And a backup is the
best thing to have for such situations (unknown outcome).

If you did have Linux GRUB, you could make a backup of the
MBR sector right now, and then you can repair damage to the
MBR from a Windows install. That's the only thing that
needs to be protected.

How do I backup just a sector?

Thanks, again.

Alek wrote:
Thanks, Paul.

Paul wrote on 10/22/2015 8:27 PM:
Alek wrote:
Can I safely upgrade the Win 8.1 partition of my dual-booting PC, or
will the installation want the entire HD?

Thanks.
An *Upgrade* install, installs within the existing C: partition.

I downloaded the Media Creation Tool and made a flash drive. That will
give me an upgrade installation, right?


Windows becomes Windows.old. A new Windows directory is created.
Things are imported from the old setup. You'll need at least 20GB
of space (roughly). If you do "powercfg -h off" as administrator,
that removes the hiberfile, and makes a bit more room for an
upgrade install.

You may see a 450MB Recovery partition being created by the
install. I don't have a feeling for whether the installer
will go to great lengths to make partitions for itself
(change a primary to extended/logical, and do stuff in
logical partitions if needed).

Standard advice is to back up the target disk.

Clone? Image?

If by dual boot, you have one hard drive with Windows 7
and one hard drive with Windows 8.1 and Linux,

One HD, multiple partitions.

While Win10 can be rolled back within 30 days of upgrade
installation, the rollback doesn't work properly. The
system will not be exactly as you left it. It is for this
reason, more than on other OSes, that a backup is required.
If you expect to safely roll back a Win10 upgrade, a
backup/restore is the way to do it.

Suggested tool?

The few test installs I've tried (like, during Preview era),
the installer was very good at "coloring inside the lines".
It didn't tend to go on a rampage. But then, I wasn't mixing
Linux GRUB and Win10 on the same hard drive. You may be able
to cook up a combo it doesn't like. And a backup is the
best thing to have for such situations (unknown outcome).

If you did have Linux GRUB, you could make a backup of the
MBR sector right now, and then you can repair damage to the
MBR from a Windows install. That's the only thing that
needs to be protected.

How do I backup just a sector?

Thanks, again.

The "dd" utility will do that. There is a Windows port.
Version 0.6b3 is the one I use here.

http://www.chrysocome.net/dd

dd.exe if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 of=C:\users\username\Downloads\mbr.bak bs=512 count=1

The command should be run in an elevated (Run as Administrator)
command prompt. For example, if the dd.exe program was in your downloads
folder, the sequence might be

cd /d C:\users\username\Downloads
dd.exe if=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 of=mbr.bak bs=512 count=1

The Windows port of "dd" is a bit "twitchy" when it comes to
permissions. You will notice some partitions cannot be accessed,
and you can tell when doing

dd.exe --list

that some of the partitions are not coughing up details. The Linux
version of "dd" can see all the partitions, and do the exact same
thing the Windows port of dd can do.

*******

For backups, you could use Macrium Reflect Free. It will place
the entire hard drive in one .mrimg file. Using a smart copy method,
it only copies the sectors with user data - white space on the disk
is not copied. It also has a data compressor, saving a bit of space
when storing the .mrimg output file.

There might be a couple other free backup utilities like that.

Windows 7 has "Windows Backup", which makes a .vhd file per partition
on the hard drive. To save a copy of Windows 7 for example, it would
save a .vhd for System Reserved partition and a .vhd for C: partition.
The output goes to X:\WindowsImageBackup and you run the risk of
overwriting the first backup you make, with a second attempt, because
of that. For simple Image backups, you can just rename the folder
to something else, so that a second backup will create a fresh
X:\WindowsImageBackup. Here, X: is the letter of your choosing,
at backup time. So you can spray the backups over a few partition
letters if you want.

On Win8/Win8.1, the Windows Backup was being deprecated. Microsoft
wanted to do something else. The GUI disappeared at some point.
I don't know whether the "wbadmin" command line version of the
program survived Win8.1 install or not. So for later OSes, that's
when Macrium came in handy.

Microsoft brought back "Win7 backup" for Windows 10, but you
won't be able to try that out until Win10 is installed. So that's
not going to help you at the moment.

There's no shortage of backup solutions, but you must prepare the
emergency boot disc, as well as test the backups you make, to ensure
there are no issues. There's nothing worse than making backups, then
discovering later (when your boot drive just croaked), that
all the backups are bad/faulty. You'd be surprised how often
that sort of thing happens (people not knowing the stuff is
busted). Some of our software developers at work wrote a backup
package, and "neglected" to test the restore. When the departmental
server went down 30 days after the software went into production,
they were all ready to try out their new toy, only to discover it
didn't work. Homer Simpson didn't exist at that time, but
it was definitely a "Doh" moment :-) The manager running the
program was a hot shot, and I would have paid a buck to see
the look on his face :-)

Paul

In article
Alek wrote:

Can I safely upgrade the Win 8.1 partition of my dual-booting PC, or
will the installation want the entire HD?

Thanks.

Upgrade will use the same partition as 8.1.

Be sure there is partition room as the upgrade keeps a rollback
folder to enable you to restore 8.1.

Depending on your bootloader approach (grub, bcd...) you may need
to manually re-establish your boot profile to access your alternate
OS.

Alek wrote:

I downloaded the Media Creation Tool and made a flash drive. That will
give me an upgrade installation, right?

When setup.exe is (on the USB media) run from within the qualifying o/s
to perform the upgrade from the qualifying o/s to Win10, the usb created
media will provide the Upgrade option.



--
....winston
msft mvp consumer apps

Paul wrote on 10/22/2015 10:43 PM:
On Win8/Win8.1, the Windows Backup was being deprecated. Microsoft
wanted to do something else. The GUI disappeared at some point.
I don't know whether the "wbadmin" command line version of the
program survived Win8.1 install or not.

I've used wbadmin on win 8.1 several times. Yes it survived.

...winston‫ wrote on 10/23/2015 2:56 AM:
Alek wrote:

I downloaded the Media Creation Tool and made a flash drive. That will
give me an upgrade installation, right?

When setup.exe is (on the USB media) run from within the qualifying o/s
to perform the upgrade from the qualifying o/s to Win10, the usb created
media will provide the Upgrade option.

Let me see if I understand. :-)

While running Windows 8.1, I navigate to the USB medium (in my case, a
flash drive), and run setup.exe.

It will offer to upgrade to Win 10.

Did I get it?

Nomen Nescio wrote on 10/23/2015 12:10 AM:
In article
Alek wrote:

Can I safely upgrade the Win 8.1 partition of my dual-booting PC, or
will the installation want the entire HD?

Thanks.

Upgrade will use the same partition as 8.1.

Be sure there is partition room as the upgrade keeps a rollback
folder to enable you to restore 8.1.

Depending on your bootloader approach (grub, bcd...) you may need
to manually re-establish your boot profile to access your alternate
OS.

I've forgotten what bootloader approach I used. Is there a way to find out?

And once I do that, how do I reestablish the boot profile?

Thanks.

Alek wrote:
Nomen Nescio wrote on 10/23/2015 12:10 AM:
In article
Alek wrote:
Can I safely upgrade the Win 8.1 partition of my dual-booting PC, or
will the installation want the entire HD?

Thanks.
Upgrade will use the same partition as 8.1.

Be sure there is partition room as the upgrade keeps a rollback
folder to enable you to restore 8.1.

Depending on your bootloader approach (grub, bcd...) you may need
to manually re-establish your boot profile to access your alternate
OS.

I've forgotten what bootloader approach I used. Is there a way to find out?

And once I do that, how do I reestablish the boot profile?

Thanks.

Imagine the following scenario.

1) Dual boot system.
2) Install a Windows.
Something boots (likely Windows, "OMG I can't find Linux").
3) Restore boot code. For example, from my LiveCD.
dd if=mbr.bak of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1
4) Something else now boots, maybe the thing with
the boot manager you want. Maybe even both
(dual boot) OSes are listed, as before.
Now GRUB is running the show again, and everything works.
Windows is chain loaded using the existing entry.

While you can mess about with install_grub, all
that is really needed is to put back stage0 GRUB
boot code. And that's the first 446 bytes of your
archived MBR.bak.

Nobody believes me, but I *have* tested this... in a VM.
I've done it a couple times in fact, but separated
by a few months.

*******

And if it was Windows on Windows, it would "just work".
Since Win10 is the latest OS, and groks the previous
crusty OSes. Installing an older Windows after a
newer Windows was installed, is a wee bit harder to do.
If you install Win10, then install WinXP, "ouch that
hurts"...

*******

If you wanted to know what was running the show,
you could "sniff" a few key areas. But that's
a bit too complicated for my liking.

Note that Linux doesn't use the "boot" (active) flag.
While Windows does. When Linux installs, it doesn't
need to change/corrupt the boot flag setup. But it
will write GRUB stage 0 to the MBR. When Windows installs,
it will write its boot loader into the MBR, removing
GRUB stage 0. (The other GRUB stages should not
be involved.) And that's where the two overlap, the MBR usage.

Paul

Alek wrote:
...winston‫ wrote on 10/23/2015 2:56 AM:
Alek wrote:

I downloaded the Media Creation Tool and made a flash drive. That will
give me an upgrade installation, right?

When setup.exe is (on the USB media) run from within the qualifying o/s
to perform the upgrade from the qualifying o/s to Win10, the usb created
media will provide the Upgrade option.

Let me see if I understand. :-)

While running Windows 8.1, I navigate to the USB medium (in my case, a
flash drive), and run setup.exe.

It will offer to upgrade to Win 10.

Did I get it?

Yes.
Ensure you remove the USB drive when Win10 setup starts it's first
restart otherwise you will boot the USB (if you system is configured to
boot first from USB). If the USB drive boots then it will attempt to
run setup.exe again as if it wasn't run from a qualifying o/s.
Eventually it will inform you that you can't upgrade by booting the
Win10 media on USB drive,but it will waste some time.

--
....winston
msft mvp consumer apps