Windows 10 What's Windows doing when I switch my boot disk.

[nani]

Hello, I don't unerstand something.

I want to have Windows 10 on 2 different SSD. So I hooked up another SSD to my PC and installed Windows 10 on that other SSD too.

I booted to the other SSD by changing the boot sequence in the the BIOS, which worked fine.

But then when I switched my boot sequence to my normal SSD again and it asked for my recovery DVD / USB stick. I managed to recover. But why is it doing that? How does it even know I have another SDD with Windows on it? Where is it storing that information, on the motherboard? I don't get why this happens, how does Windows know I am using 2 different SSD with 2 different OS on it?

 

[Jimbo22]

Why the same OS on 2 different drives?

What I surmised with your setup; when you installed the 2nd drive in your system, you didn't remove the first drive and then installed the OS on 2nd drive. Not removing the 2nd drive has caused the MBR for both OS's to be installed and kept on the first drive. Which is most likely the cause of all your issues.

What you're trying to do is called a multi boot where you are using separate HDD's. Where a dual boot setup is using the same drive but creating a 2nd partition to install the 2nd OS on which the MBR is on the 1st partition. With a multi boot....all drives are to be removed and the new OS with it's MBR are installed on said drive. Once done then you reattach 1st drive and boot up. Now when you want to change OS's....you have to reboot and then at post beep tat the F12 key to bring up the boot order menu (which bypasses having to enter the BIOS) and just select a drive you want to boot from.

As for your question: that information is stored in the MBR which is on those small partions of the C drive .... in windows 10 those are; 450 MB and 100 MB partitions. With out those your system will never boot.

 

[nani]

thank you for that info

will try it again

Why I want to do this is just to have a drive to test things out on, that I can wipe by formatting whenever I want, without affecting my main drive. I used to use a different PC to do this, but it became financially prohibitive to keep udating hardware on 2 PC.

Thanks for the tip with F12, I went into the BIOS each time with DEL and manually set boot sequence.

 

[Jimbo22]

You're welcome.

Have you thought about using a Linux distro on the 2nd HDD or even possibly a 3rd drive?

 

[Neemobeer]

A dump of the BCD store while on each Windows 10 instance would be helpful and a screenshot of disk management

*BCD Dump*
bcdedit /enum