Dual Boot to 2 Separate SSD using Win 10

Question

Hi all,
wanting to know if i should be expecting any problems in setting this up and ongoing. one drive will have office applications for work, the other separate SSD will have games. from my digging around the only precautions that needs to be observed is to make sure the first SSD is unplugged while installing Windows onto the second SSD.

When i first bought the computer the attendant in the shop used a windows boot menu, a nice blue screen, so the boot record for the second drive was actually on the first drive, (see picture above) now that iam upgrading the second drive to a larger size to accommodate larger games, the system is having a hernia, chkdsk runs on most boot ups and deletes files all over the place. i have replaced the upgraded second drive with the original drive, and all problems have ceased. Would deleting the additional boot record fix the problem, if so, which is the book record to delete? Or do you think there is no way out of this and i will have to reinstall windows on the first drive?, if that is the case, then the first question in this post is focus.

TIA

Answer 1

Then there is the problem if one drive develops a fault, will that create problems for the other? perhaps the only way is to do 2 new windows installs, but i cant do that every time i change 1 drive

I'm not sure why you would keep having disk failures. Only the disk manufacturer may know the answer to that one. A better option may be to use a hardware mirror (raid 1) where you have a fault tolerant set. One or the other disks fails and the OS lives on, you replace the failed disk and the controller rebuilds the array back to fault tolerance.

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Answer 2

Simpler solution is to not remove disks during setup. Boot the install media, delete / recreate partitions, continue the install. After first OS install is complete then without removing and disks, again boot the install media, choose the second disk for installation delete / recreate partitions and continue the install, you'll now have a dual boot system.

Another method would be to install the hyper-v role and the second OS instance as a virtual machine.

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Answer 3

You shouldn't need to anything. In this example at boot the boot loader will show for 10 seconds before the default option attempts to boot.

do you think that by deleting the second boot record via msconfig

In theory, but in practicality may be trial and error

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Answer 4

its my understanding that the only reason that second boot record is there is because of the way the computer was setup originally to boot using a windows interface not the usual F11 option. if i do a clean install on C:, will it still show D: (bootable drive) in this window?

Answer 5

the usual F11 option

This sounds like something third party as I've never seen it, or maybe it was caused by the disk swapping that was done. The boot loader options seen here are the normal methods provided by windows.

Here is what you should normally see at boot for 10 seconds.

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