How to Use Bcdedit to Dual Boot Windows Installations?

What are the bcdedit commands necessary to setup dual boot between different installations of Windows?⁵

Background

I recently installed Windows 8 onto a separate hard drive¹. Now that Windows 8 in installed I want to dual-boot back to Windows 7.

I have my two² hard drives:

So you can see that I have my two disks, with the partitions containing Windows:

• Windows 7: \\PhysicalDisk0 (partition 0³)
• Windows 8: \\PhysicalDisk2 (partition 1)

What I'm trying to figure out how is how to use bcdedit to instruct the thing that boots Windows that there is another Windows installation out there.

Running bcdedit now, it shows current configuration:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>bcdedit

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
device                  partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume2
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
integrityservices       Enable
default                 {current}
resumeobject            {ce153eb7-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f}
displayorder            {current}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {current}
device                  partition=C:
path                    \WINDOWS\system32\winload.exe
description             Windows 8
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence        {ce153eb9-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f}
integrityservices       Enable
recoveryenabled         Yes
allowedinmemorysettings 0x15000075
osdevice                partition=C:
systemroot              \WINDOWS
resumeobject            {ce153eb7-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f}
nx                      OptIn
bootmenupolicy          Standard
hypervisorlaunchtype    Auto

I cannot find any documentation on the difference between Windows Boot Manager and Windows Boot Loader.

Documentation

There is some documentation on Bcdedit:

• Technet: Command Line Reference - Bcdedit
• Technet: Windows Automated Installation Kit - BCDEdit Command Line Options
• Whitepaper - BCDEdit Commands for Boot Environment (Word Document)

But they don't explain how to edit the binary boot configuration data.

If I had to guess, I would think that a Windows Boot Manager instructs the BIOS what program it should run. That program would give the user a set of boot choices. That leaves Windows Boot Loader do be a particular boot choice, that represents a particular installation of Windows.

If that is the case I would need to create a new Windows Boot Loader entry.

This means I might want to use the /create parameter: