I have 3 drives currently in my laptop (2 ssd one HDD) what I would like to accomplish is to have to 2 Windows 10 Pro Installations on separate SSD.
Well nothing difficult get media and install media and install 2nd Windows on another drive (there are thousands of topic about this) – Well not exactly.
Stuff below contains a lot of my guessing how things work so if I am wrong feel free to roast me like a chicken and correct me.
When I install Windows 10 for the first time on the computer Windows crates additional partition on a hard drive. Ass far as I understand this partition contains boot agent which loads up a system. Now when I will try to install another Windows 10 on another drive some records about installation would still be written to that boot partition on a first drive making 2nd windows dependant on the presence of the 1st drive and that's not something I am going for. What I would like to accomplish is complete separation between those 2 installations so if I remove either of the drives nothing bad will happen. The choice between systems would have to be made on UEFI/BIOS level either by Boot Sequence or Hitting F11 during start and choosing a drive. (So each drive/systems has it's own boot agent).
Is such a setup possible? My idea right now is to disconnect 1st drive during installation of 2nd Windows so Windows would be forced to create another boot partition on 2nd drive and then reconnect first drive after installation.
But how would UEFI/BIOS react to such an action. As far as I know Windows during installation is adding some key's to UEFI/BIOS registers and I am a bit afraid that after reconnecting first drive I would no longer be able to boot it since UEFI would not recognize it's boot agent as valid. (In another words 2nd installation would override 1st installation records in UEFI) and that would be a disaster.
Has anyone ever tried to accomplish such setup?
(I've done a lot of research but all articles tend to result in shared boot agent approach).
Big thanks in advance for your help and guidance.
Best Answer
You could also install a Linux distro ( Linux lite for example) and let grub look after your booting. I actually did this by mistake once when I put a drive from another machine into my main driver. I updated grub in Linux and there were the two windows 10 installs, both on their own drive and each remained seperate. That machine still exists with those two drives and the I've never had much of a problem. The only problem being.... When a program looks for their own thing... Like a daw looking for vst files or a music program looking for tunes there would be duplication. I mask of the drive or just disable it on f I know there is going to be an issue. You can also correct this with permissions in windows. Just take ownership of the opposing drive and take wine was permissions away from each opposing win 10 install. ( That's a little bit like teaching the at to eat spaghetti with chopsticks so you might want to take the whole permissions thing as a unnessisary headache.) But it's always good to learn a new skill right?