two installs of windows 10

[emosun]

has anyone here ever had two windows 10 installs on a machine at the same time on two different drives?

I currently have a legacy version of windows 10 installed on one drive. I'd like that install to remain unchanged. What i'd like to do is install a more up to date vanilla install of windows 10 to a second separate m.2 drive.

I'm aware this is 100% normal and possible with windows 9x , xp , windows 7 , ect.... What I don't actually know is if it's possible to do this with windows 10.

i have the board set to bios instead of uefi... and i ASSUME i can just tap F8 or something during the boot and select a drive to boot from? or is it going to be more of a nightmare than that?

much like any virus or malware , i assume a vanilla copy of windows 10 will f*** with the legacy copy of windows on the other drive?

[Crunchy Dragon]

I've done it before when installing a new OS drive.

I simply install the empty drive, install Windows on it, boot to it, and do whatever I need to before formatting the old one. Never had any problems with that method, but I've never tried running it long-term.

 

Intuition suggests it should work okay.

[GuiltySpark_]

I've not done it myself but I've come across a few people that have, usually when buying a new drive and installing windows to it but leaving both installed when they boot up. I think you're just presented with a similar screen to this where you select which to boot into. Now, when I've seen this, they've both had the same name so it can get confusing the first time. (if they are both Windows 10, for example)

 

*edit* This may not work if you don't install second OS while the first OS drive is in the system. If you install them independently you may not get this option? Honestly don't know.

 

 

Then in System Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recover you can tweak how that process works.

 

[emosun]

1 minute ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Intuition suggests it should work okay.

yeah my intuition says thats how it's supposed to work , i just don't want to find out how wrong I am the hard way.

3 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I simply install the empty drive, install Windows on it, boot to it

is there a boot menu to select which drive or is it only bios controlled

[jaslion]

So depending how you did it dither windows gives you a select screen or you need to boot select from bios or the quickboot shortcut

[Brando212]

oh yeah, nothing has changed in that space, you can install as many instances as you want and they'll just append to the bootloader. Much simpler than dual booting Windows with Linux.

 

Installing 2 instances of 10 may give you the same label on both though; not entirely sure how that piece is handled. If that happens though then you can easily rename one of the entries with a BCD editor like https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

[GuiltySpark_]

Just now, Brando212 said:

 https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

Wow, I remember that from a decade ago. Been a while.

[Brando212]

5 minutes ago, GuiltySpark_ said:

Wow, I remember that from a decade ago. Been a while.

oh yeah, I haven't used them in ages either but they're still my go to recommendation for editing the bootloader. It supports UEFI, to some extent, these days too.

[emosun]

31 minutes ago, Brando212 said:

Installing 2 instances of 10 may give you the same label on both though; not entirely sure how that piece is handled. If that happens though then you can easily rename one of the entries with a BCD editor like https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

well ideally by tapping one of the F keys I should get a list of drive and the two m.2 drives will be labeled differently no? they are different models

[TrigrH]

You need to pay attention to your boot partitions. If windows finds a boot partition on another HDD (such as a windows install) it won't create a new boot partition and use the existing one. Which means one install will require the other drive to be connected in order to boot.

 

I know uefi works this way, BIOS may be different.

[emosun]

3 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

You need to pay attention to your boot partitions. If windows finds a boot partition on another HDD (such as a windows install) it won't create a new boot partition and use the existing one. Which means one install will require the other drive to be connected in order to boot.

 

I know uefi works this way, BIOS may be different.

if i pull out the old drive , install windows on the new drive by itself, then reinstall the old drive would that isolate it enough?

[TrigrH]

8 minutes ago, emosun said:

if i pull out the old drive , install windows on the new drive by itself, then reinstall the old drive would that isolate it enough?

I've seen windows somehow adopt the other one....

 

You could put your BIOS into hybrid uefi+csm

 

Have a legacy install and a uefi install? That might work?

[Sjaakie]

15 minutes ago, emosun said:

if i pull out the old drive , install windows on the new drive by itself, then reinstall the old drive would that isolate it enough?

 

Yes. Windows may indeed fool around with bootloaders. To prevent this take out the old drive, connect the new drive and install Windows so it won't screw up with the old boot loader. The new drive will get it's own boot loader.

 

Then reattach the old drive and select the desired Windows Boot Manager / drive in the bios boot menu.

 

Though you may need to keep changing bios setting from legacy to uefi if you want to use both in the same pc. Probably easier to install them both legacy for now.

[emosun]

1 hour ago, TrigrH said:

Have a legacy install and a uefi install? That might work?

what if theyre both legacy? surely that'd work yeah?
 

 

1 hour ago, Sjaakie said:

Probably easier to install them both legacy for now.

i gotta be honest i never thought uefi was a good idea and prefer legacy anyway so hopefully it works