Limit drives per windows 10 install

[Maslofski]

Ive tried googling it, but it just spams me with dual boot stuff, which isnt what i want.

 

Im going to use my pc for work, so my plan was to get another drive and windows key to just boot into the one i need at that time.

 

I dont want my "work pc" to use/see more than its one drive, nor the "gaming pc" to see the new drive. Would that be possible?

 

The way I see it I would still have all drives show up on both windows installs, which would defeat the purpose of keeping them separate.

[LWM723]

Just disable the other drive in device manager.

[An0maly_76]

Technically, what you're talking about would best be solved with dual boot, but what you're talking about is still a dual boot of sorts. A simple solution might be to create a bootable USB for your work stuff, and simply do it that way, putting your USB as the first device in boot order. I would recommend a USB extender cable if you do that, this will reduce wear and tear on your USB ports.

[mariushm]

You could just install your work Windows in a virtual machine. Give it lots of RAM and a few CPU cores and it would be fine, practically transparent. 

 

See VirtualBox, VMWare, other virtual machine solutions... you can run them from Windows easily, no need for Linux.

 

You MAY be able to do a hardware solution through BIOS presets / templates if your motherboard allows something like that. So basically you could go in BIOS and disable certain SATA ports (where the hard drives you don't want Windows to see would be) and save a template/profile with these settings. 

Then when you turn on the PC, you would have to press a key to select the bios profile to be used or something like that. 

 

But just disabling the hard drives you don't want to be seen through device manager should work just as well. 

 

NOTE though it could be a licensing issue, if you're thinking of doing this for licenses. For example, a software could collect data from computer and use the serial numbers of hard drives to build a unique key for your system and based on that key, you'd get a serial number. If you don't want that software's licensing scheme to include your other drive, then you would have to physically remove the drive or disable the SATA port, so that Windows won't see the drive at all. 

This is easily solved by running your work Windows in a virtual machine. 

 

[Needfuldoer]

In each Windows install, remove the drive letter assignment for the other install's drive or partition in Disk Management.

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/disk-management/change-a-drive-letter

[Maslofski]

thank you for all the tips, guys. 

 

a vm wont work as i need the full power.

 

Ill give it a try with the other suggestions once i get the new drive

[Kilrah]

One solution is to bitlocker-encrypt both drives, set to require a USB key to unlock, and have different USB keys to unlock each. Plug the key for the system you want to use.

[mariushm]

16 minutes ago, Maslofski said:

thank you for all the tips, guys. 

 

a vm wont work as i need the full power.

 

Ill give it a try with the other suggestions once i get the new drive

You can get pretty much 95%+ of the base machine raw power with a virtual machine.  Modern processors have virtualization and you can have pass through for video cards and other things.

[Maslofski]

14 minutes ago, mariushm said:

You can get pretty much 95%+ of the base machine raw power with a virtual machine.  Modern processors have virtualization and you can have pass through for video cards and other things.

right, but the policies are against vms, so a better way to have expressed it wouldve been like this on my end