📎 AI Summary:
The thread discusses a dual-boot setup with Windows 7 and Windows 8 on separate hard drives, where the user experiences recurring disk check errors on the non-boot drives after switching OSes. The main concern is these checks cause delays and potential risks to data integrity. A helpful suggestion is to disable Windows 8's fast startup, which may improve drive stability, and to use the boot device menu for OS switching instead of physically reconnecting drives.

JimInWoodstock

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Jun 9, 2013
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2
Thread Author #1
I am dual booting win8 and win7. I actually have win8 installed on its own hard drive and win 7 installed in its own hard drive. The win7 hard drive has been in use for the past 2 years and I have had Win8 running for about a week now. I purchased another hard drive for Win8 and left the old Win7 as it was.
I also have 3 other hard drives in the system. Everything is formatted NTFS.
So my system is as follows
Drive C - Boot Drive - I physically swap out the dedicated hard drive for Win 8 or Win 7
Drive D - internal 250 GB sata drive
Drive F - internal 250 GB sata drive
Drive H - internal 250 GB hard drive.
I have been running this config for about 2 years under Win7 with no problems.
The problem that I have now is when I swap the boot drive and boot up a different OS than last time (Like booting Win8, powering down system, swap boot drive, boot Win7) the system always says that there are problems on the all 3 non-boot drives. It runs chkdsk(it least that is what it look like) and processes the 3 non boot disks one at a time which take about 10-15 minutes for all 3. Most of the time it finds no problems, but about 1 out of 5 boots will find a problem with one of the disks and then fixes it. The disks seem to be OK while I am running. I then power down and swap boot drive and reboot the other os and we start all over again. I am powering the system completely down for each system to make sure that the disk cache is flushed.So far the disk problems have been fixed by chkdsk at boot, but I am sure the day will come when the disk cannot be fixed and I will loose data.
 

Solution
Windows 8 has something called fast startup. You might try unchecking it to see if it helps. Control Panel-Power Options-System settings, bottom of page under Shutdown settings.

You should be able to select a boot device with a boot device menu during boot. Physically disconnecting the drives should not be necessary.

Saltgrass

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Microsoft Community Contributor
Joined
Oct 16, 2009
Messages
15,152
Windows 8 has something called fast startup. You might try unchecking it to see if it helps. Control Panel-Power Options-System settings, bottom of page under Shutdown settings.

You should be able to select a boot device with a boot device menu during boot. Physically disconnecting the drives should not be necessary.
 

Solution