Dual Booting 2 completely isolated installations of windows

[synonymcal]

I only have one pc. And I do a lot of dumb stuff on it. Recently lost a lot of important stuff to viruses.

I'd like to dual boot two completely isolated installations of windows without virtualization or taking a hit to the performance.
As far as I know in traditional dual booting the OS'es arent completely separated, if one gets compromised then the files on the other installation can be affected.

 

Is there any real and comparatively simple way to dual boot two completely isolated installations of windows without taking a hit to the performance.

[adm0n]

I'm not one totally sure, but the only way to ensure they can't compromise each others data, is that they do not have access to the data. Even if you'd encrypt both of them, ransomware could still encrypt your encrypted data again...

 

If you have two different drives, you could make sure, that one of them will never be mounted by windows. (https://www.windowscentral.com/how-mount-drive-windows-10 , shows also how to unmount a drive)

This way no one will even know if it is there, unless they check for unmounted drives.

 

Alternatively, you could always physically disconnect whatever drive you don't need

 

[Kilrah]

You can encrypt both drives with bitlocker separately from within their own OS, that way when you run one the other can't be accessed without you manually entering the key for it.

[windozedev]

On this you can have an endless number of different windows builds on one drive, all in isolated image containers. Only 10 slots at a time though.

https://github.com/joshuacline/windick

[synonymcal]

On 11/26/2022 at 3:45 AM, Berris Fueller said:

On this you can have an endless number of different windows builds on one drive, all in isolated image containers. Only 10 slots at a time though.

is there any tutorials on this?? because i cant find any online. im not the best at command prompt stuff

[windozedev]

No commands are necessary :

 

[heatonpkmassive]

I know this is old and you may already have found the answer to the question you are asking, which is how to have them both co-exist on the same system without either OS 'knowing' about the other, and the the answer is yes it is. It's easy and I'm running W10 and W11 alongside one another on different SSDs, neither knows about the other, you could remove either disk and the OS on the disk still in there will always boot.

 

It's this simple:

 

Install each OS with only the disk you want to install it on fitted and connected in the system, disconnect all other disks. Repeat for the second OS and then once done, reconnect the drive with the first OS. You can then use the BIOS boot key, on my board it's F11, to select which disk to boot off. 

Works perfectly and no bootloader or boot files placed on disks other than your main bootdisk.

[Kilrah]

5 hours ago, heatonpkmassive said:

I know this is old and you may already have found the answer to the question you are asking, which is how to have them both co-exist on the same system without either OS 'knowing' about the other, and the the answer is yes it is. It's easy and I'm running W10 and W11 alongside one another on different SSDs, neither knows about the other, you could remove either disk and the OS on the disk still in there will always boot.

That wasn't the question, it was about preventing each OS from being able to access the data that's on the other drive at all.