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Booting with 2 Windows 10 drives online

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Regular Poster
Posts: 198
Comments: 120

Hello,

Yes, I am booting with 2 windows 10/64 drives online at the same time.
I have no choice.
One drive (SSD) is my daily business drive. The other is a Samsung 970 M.2 NVMe evening fun drive.

This is the computer hardware setup.

One (1) Samsung 970 EVO M.2 NVMe 500 GB with Windows 10/64
Two (2) Hot Swap Internally connected Sata SSD Drive Bays.

How the Hot Swap internal sata drive bays are used:
#1 : Hot Swap Drive Bay: SSD with Windows 10/64 daytime business drive.
#2 : Hot Swap Drive Bay: 2 TB Backup drive. (Only populated when needed to run ATI)

I have to constantly make bios changes so that I boot to the needed drive. If I shut down and pull out the SSD and then boot, the NVMe boots fine but the next time I want to boot to the Hot Swap SSD, I have to go into bios and change the setting to point to the SSD first. There must be a more logical way to do this.

In bios, if I set 1st boot as the SSD and 2nd boot as the NVMe, the SSD boots fine. If I shut down, remove the SSD and then boot, the NVMe boots fine. If I shut down, re-insert the SSD and boot, the NVMe boots because bios has automatically moved the NVMe to 1st boot position and the SSD shows up in the 2nd boot position.... you begin to see the cycle here....

And, the WARNINGS.... never boot with 2 copies of your OS installed and available.... but we don't have much choice here.

Motherboard is Asus B-350-F AMD processor 32 gig mem.
My ATI backups are all run manually so I do not encounter any scheduling problems.

Just thought I would ask the forum to see how some members may handle a similar situation.

Happy New Year to Everyone !

Steve F.

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Steve, I have been using dual-boot systems for some years but only with Legacy machines as didn't have a UEFI box until earlier this year when I invested in a new laptop, but which currently is only single boot.

The tools that I have used are from a company called NeoSmart Technologies and in particular are their EasyBCD and iReboot tools.

EasyBCD is used to modify the Windows BCD configuration to add a second or more OS, while iReboot allows an easy method of booting into any of the configured OS from a System Tray icon menu entry.

I would recommend reading the NeoSmart Knowledgebase article EasyBCD and UEFI as you will be using a UEFI boot system so that you will understand a warning message that the tool will give but which apply to Legacy OS entries.

Steve F,

I had a look at your motherboard manual.  Here's what I would suggest.  ASUS bios supports what called a Boot Menu.  This allows (in theory) a one time boot to the drive of your choice without entering the bios and changing the boot order.

You access the Boot Menu by pressing repeatedly the F8 keyboard key during the POST process.  The menu will appear showing the available boot options.  Select the option you want to boot and that boot loader should run and boot the selected drive/device.

I say "in theory" and "should" as you may find that selecting a boot device this way does not work.  I have now and have had ASUS motherboards that have failed here.  More often than not the boot menu will work for you.  I would suggest that the way to do this is to practice ejecting your Win 10 SSD hot swap drive prior to booting to the M.2 drive.  So a run of this would be as follows:

  1. Shutdown PC and eject SSD removing from caddy
  2. Start up PC repeatedly pressing the F8 key during post until the Boot Menu appears.
  3. In the boot menu look for the UEFI M.2 drive, select it and continue to boot.
  4. When finished for the session, shutdown PC, install the SSD, start the PC and using F8 access the Boot Menu.  Select the SSD and continue to boot.
  5. Ensure that you have in fact booted the SSD drive, once confirmed then you shutdown or sleep the PC. 

The SSD should remain the selected boot device until you repeat the procedure above or manually select a different boot device.

Regular Poster
Posts: 198
Comments: 120

Steve S and Enchant,

Thank you for your feedback.  Lots to digest.  I'll take a look and "fiddle" around and see what seems to work.

Early this year, I accidentally booted with 2 SSD's installed, which resulted in one corrupted windows drive which required ATI to resurrect.

I have been booting with my current setup for a few weeks now and have not "yet" lost to a corrupted windows system.... but I do not have faith in such a method of booting with 2 OS's available.

Thank You !

Steve F..  

 

Steve F.

I have in use an ICY dock 2.5 inch 4 bay drive adapter which allows for the quick removal of OS drives.  I also have a pair of Samsung 970 PRO M.2 drives in raid 0 as my main boot drive.  I use the F8 boot menu option to boot installed OS drives in the ICY dock caddy and most often, it works just fine.

What I find to mess it up is when I boot to removable media.  There are times when I boot to such media and then upon restart the bios will not pickup the Windows Boot Manager option and instead look to my CD/DVD drive for a boot loader which is the default on this particular board.  When that occurs I get a "No boot device found" error.  It is simple to F2 into the bios and change the boot order back to Windows Boot Manager and fix the problem. 

Let us know how it works out for you.

Regular Poster
Posts: 198
Comments: 120

Enchant and Steve S.

Thanks for all the suggestions and reading material to get me up to speed.

I have tested the F8 boot method.  After 10 reboot test and alternating boot drives, It has , so far, proven to be reliable.  Darn, I should have thought of that.... and I have the printed manual right here in the box.... But..that is what makes this forum so outstanding, you get good solid results from the members.

Thanks again to both of you !

I'll keep testing the method and post again after a few days of testing.

Regards,

Steve F.

 

The F8 method should continue to work fine for you. Just one simple tip. Press and hold down the F8 key until the boot menu appears instead of wearing out your keyboard and fingers repeatedly tapping the F8 key.

Steve F.

Great! Glad to hear that all is working as it should.

Hi Perdido,

have you tried this? having both disks attached to the computer and having both Windows 10 in the Windows boot manager (bcdedit).

 

Windows 10 supports multi / dualboot, even with UEFI and Secure Boot enabled. Let me know if you need more details. I am not often around here but receive reply email notifications.

 

 

Regular Poster
Posts: 198
Comments: 120

Steve S, Mustang, Enchant, Karl,

All working well with the F8 option.  Holding down the F8 key upon boot gives me the option to boot from optical, NVMe or the SSD.  Very repeatable.  Can't ask more than that....  ALL Good so far...

Thank  you all for the ideas

Steve F.

Steve F.

Good to hear!  Thanks for posting your results.

Thanks for the praise! Welcome back anytime.