Dual Boot Win10 with 2 drives

[Hybrid Divide]

Greetings all.  (Bits of this could belong in Troubleshooting, too.)

 

For the past year and a half, since I built my most recent system, I ran it using a dual Win 10 boot setup.

I have two 500GB SSD drives, one internal, that I use for my work, the other in a SATA 6gbps dock built into my case.

(It's sort of a discipline thing, so I'm less tempted to game while doing work.  When working, the game drive is disconnected.)

 

The way I did this the first time, was to install Win10 on one SSD as normal, get it up to a baseline setup, then I cloned the drive, and just selected the drive I wanted to use as I booted.  

 

This was fine for over a year, but lately, the internal SSD (work one) has been getting lots of drive errors, every time I'd load up the gaming drive, it would complain that the work drive needed to be fixed, and my next boot to the work either wouldn't boot into windows, or would run chkdsk before doing so.  Now that work drive won't boot into windows at all. It loads SOMETHING of Win10, as I see those spinning dots, indicating that Windows is loading, it just never moves past that point.  Attempting a repair from an install USB does nothing.  My first thought was that the SSD may be going bad, but I've run multiple diagnostics in multiple apps, and all say the drive is fine.

 

I can get all my data off of it via the gaming drive (still works just fine!), so I'm ok with having to reinstall Windows, which brings me to my real question.  (Though if you do know how I'd be able to reboot the work drive, I'd love to know!)

 

Is there any way to run two Win10 installs on separate drives on the same machine and get them to play nicer with eachother than the way I did it the first time?

 

I realize I had a lot leading up to that question, but I needed to provide some context.

Thank you in advance for the help.

-----------

PC Specs:

CPU: Intel Core i7 6700K

RAM: 32GB DDR4

GPU: EVGA Geforce GTX 980

MOBO: Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 (Rev: 1.0) With latest firmware)

Boot SSD: 2x Samsung 500GB SATA

Storage HDD: Western Digital 3TB HDD

Case: Corsair 650D

OS: Windows 10 Pro

[givingtnt]

16 minutes ago, Hybrid Divide said:

-snip-

you want 2 os running at the same time or you want to switch between the 2 drives each reboot ?

if its the latter, its super easy, as you can just pick in the bios wich drive to boot from when you start the pc (usually f11 or f10)

[Hybrid Divide]

Thanks for the reply.  Yeah, I just want to be able to select them at boot.  That's how I did it the first time. But it was almost like the windows installs were interfering with eachother after awhile.  

 

I thought there might be something special I need to do to make sure I don't have similar issues again.

[Daniel644]

I dual boot between 8.1 installed on 1 SSD and 10 installed on my other SSD in my laptop, I just have to SPAM the ESC key when powering on to bring up the boot menu and pick the correct drive. But my SATA controller in the laptop is going out so I get errors like that on some boots and also sometimes see a SOLID Hard Drive activity light (not even a flicker), when that happens is usually when I have the errors trying to boot. My advice would be to try using a different SATA port inside the computer and maybe even swap the SATA cable used on the internal drive, I know that solved some issues we had with a drive one time on the work desktop.

[Hybrid Divide]

43 minutes ago, Daniel644 said:

I dual boot between 8.1 installed on 1 SSD and 10 installed on my other SSD in my laptop, I just have to SPAM the ESC key when powering on to bring up the boot menu and pick the correct drive. But my SATA controller in the laptop is going out so I get errors like that on some boots and also sometimes see a SOLID Hard Drive activity light (not even a flicker), when that happens is usually when I have the errors trying to boot. My advice would be to try using a different SATA port inside the computer and maybe even swap the SATA cable used on the internal drive, I know that solved some issues we had with a drive one time on the work desktop.

I'll give that a shot. Thanks!