Multi-booting is a procedure with which you can boot into more than one operating system of your choice on a single PC. Suppose you installed Windows 8 in dual-boot with Windows 7. For this you will have a dual-boot menu when you start your system. You will have to choose either of the OSs or it will boot into the default OS after a fixed period of time.
Starting from Windows 8, Microsoft introduced a modern (Metro style) graphical boot menu which is mouse and touch friendly, and has extra options. Before this, on Windows 7 or vista, the boot menu was as simple as text-based black and white. So if you have installed Windows 7 after installing Windows 8 or any later version, you will get Windows 7’s classic boot menu. To most, this classic text-based boot option is not pleasing.
Here I will show you how you can enable GUI based boot menu or switch to classic boot menu. Before proceeding, it’s recommended to create a recovery drive so that you have backup in case you loose your boot loader.
Switch from Text-based to Graphical Boot Menu
- Boot into Windows 8 or any newer Windows you have in boot menu.
- Press Windows Key + X on your keyboard and click Command Prompt (Admin).
- Type the following command and press enter:
bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy standard - You should see a success message in next line as following:
- Close CMD window and restart your PC to see effect.
Switch from Graphical to Text-based Boot Menu
- Boot into Windows 8 or any newer version and run Command Prompt as admin like above guide.
- Type following command and hit enter:
bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy
- After seeing success message, close Command Prompt and restart Windows to see it in effect.
- That’s it!
Easier Way (If you have Windows 7 in Boot Option)
If you make Windows 7’s boot-loader as default, your boot menu will be turned into non-graphical boot menu. To do that,
- Boot into any Windows and press Windows Key + R. Type msconfig and hit OK.
- From Boot tab, select Windows 7 and click Set as default.
- Close the program.
This will make your PC run old black and white boot loader. To revert back to Windows 8’s beautiful bootloader UI, select Windows 8 there and press Set as default.
You can also checkout Xandy’s other guides at SuperUser.