Dual Boot In Win 8 Using 2 Hard Drives?
Dec 16, 2012
Is it possible to have two hard drives in the computer and to be able to choose which one to start with ?
I have in mind that one hard drive has all my normal programs and the other is used for Flight simulation program.
Both hard drives would have win 8 installed. If I could use one hard drive and partition it so the flight sim is on a separate partition. However, for two reasons I wouldn't want this as the flight sim with scenery requires a lot of Gigs. and secondly I believe that it would run faster on its own hard drive.
So. Is it possible to set up the computer to decide which Drive I wish to start ? and if so, how to set it up ?
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Nov 6, 2012
I have Win 7 on a 60gb ssd hard drive. I would like to put another 60gb ssd drive in my computer and run win 8 off of this. Is it possible to run this as a dual boot system. Will I get the option to boot into either when I boot up.
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Jan 3, 2014
When I try to boot to Win 7, I get the logo and then a black screen. I have tried all the repairs and nothing works. Win 8.1 is fine.
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Nov 17, 2013
Currently I have a machine with Windows 8 pre-installed already. But now I don't like Windows 8 as much because certain programs I want to use requires Windows 7. Though I would still like to keep Windows 8 because it's licensed. I have an extra hard drive lying around with Windows 7 loaded in it already. Now I would like to dual boot between these two drives. Do I have to turn off Secure Boot and change the boot orders around to boot the Windows 7 hard drive?
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Jul 21, 2014
I have Windows 8 installed on 2 Samsung SSDs - one is 840 Pro and the other is 840 Evo. This is because I work on both video and music production and would like to keep things separate.
At first I tried cloning an "old" SSD on to both Pro and Evo to make life easy, but it was a total mess:
I would boot Windows 8 on either Evo or Pro, and before the password prompt, Windows would fire up a Checkdisk on one (or more) of the 5 HD I have (please find the logs and disklayout in the attachments).
This would usually happen if for eg, I'm working on Evo and then I restart to work on Pro - or vice-versa.
But sometimes I would be working on either one of them, and this flag notification would popup asking me to restart because Windows needs to perform a diskcheck.
What is strange to me is that if I do a manual diskcheck (right-click -> Properties -> Tools), it would complete it, the notification disappears but would return a second or two later.
There was a minor issue where for eg, some options in the Control Panel were still pointing to drive H: which before the cloning, was my original C: drive.
Otherwise all software was working perfectly fine.
So I decided to do a clean re-install on both Pro and Evo hoping to solve this diskcheck issue once and for all.
This was 10 days ago, and for the past 10 days I had used almost exclusively the Evo drive. Today I need to work on Pro but Windows wouldn't get past the diskcheck and on to the password prompt.
It's saying "Preparing for Repair", then changes to "Diagnosing your PC" but then this blue screen pops up asking me to choose between Shut Down or Advanced Options.
This happened on rare occasions, but before the fresh install, I would do this perhaps a couple of times in a row (i.e. go to the blue screen Advanced Options and click Exit and Continue to Windows 8) restart, and it would eventually go past the diskcheck and allow me to log in and work. But today it just won't do it.
EDIT: I don't know if it matters but as it is now, it automatically boots up on Pro unless I hit F12 and choose to boot on Evo. But as I said earlier I had only been using Evo for the past 10 days since the re-install.
Attached please find the Srt logfiles which I found by following a path shown to me on that blue screen.
The strange thing is that the path started with drive H: and why drive H: and not C: (i.e. the Pro drive, being the current Windows boot drive). But when I booted on Evo, and went on drive J: (the drive letter that Pro is assigned when I'm on Evo), I found the logfiles there.
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Jan 24, 2013
I currently have a machine installed with Windows 8 pro 64 bit installed on one Samsung 840 pro SSD. Works great. I recently added a second Crucial m4 SSD and would like to install Linux on it... I am having major issues doing so mainly because of UEFI... and when installing Linux it does not see Windows 8 installed on any drive therefore making it rather difficult to install both OSes.
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Sep 4, 2013
I have a pc with 4 drives. And I got a new job, working from home and i wanted to make one of the drives just for work. It was one that i had windows 7 one and no longer used after i bought an ssd an put windows 8 on it. I am really liking 8 and so I put 8 on the second drive that had windows 7 on it.
It all worked fine, but when i tried to have two windows 8 drives on the same pc it made the drives unbootable. I had to re install windows on both drives again. I did some reading and i think its the fast boot feature of windows 8 that's causing the issue. I disabled fast boot on both hard drives. And before I plug them both in at the same time. I want to make sure that im not going to loos all my data again.
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Jun 20, 2013
Just bought a HDD on amazon and I was wondering if it comes with an SATA cable. It didnt say it did, nor did it say it didnt include one. If not, where could I buy one?
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Jul 25, 2013
I purchased an Acer laptop from EBay. It was listed as a refurbished unit. However it looks like it was a complete system wipe and OS replacement. There are no Acer hardware drivers installed and no Acer applications available. My real problem is that the computer has been set up with two hard drives visible in "Computer" a (C drive and "New Volume (D. I believe that when this computer was "refurbished" the installer improperly assigned the drives. In disk management the drives are labeled Disk 0: System reserved 350 MB and New Volume (D 297.75 GB. Disk 1: (C 18.64GB. The C: drive is completely full, with the OS however, it is also the default drive meaning that everything tries to install to that drive, but can't. I want to move the (C drive to the New Volume (D drive or merge the two drives together. Is there a way to perform this task so that the computer will boot up into Windows 8.
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May 23, 2013
Computer: Dell Inspiron 530
Operating System: Windows Vista home prem. upgraded to Windows 8 home Pro. 32 bit.
BIOS Rev. 1.0.15
Hard drives: (# 1) Samsung 500 Gig with 2 partitions. (# 2) WD 500 Gig with 2 partitions. Clone of #1
Ram: 3 Gig
Problem: On start up with either drive, the system goes to a blue screen with a clock (different time zone) on pushing Ctrl + Alt + Delete a log in prompt comes on. After logging in a window with the circling dots and Preparing Windows comes on That stays on for about 4 minutes and then a black screen comes on. Pushing the power button will cause Shutting Down to appear breifly and then the machine shuts down. I have a backup of Drive #1 on an external drive.
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Nov 26, 2013
I have a Toshiba Satellite P855. it has an i5 processor, 8 gig of RAM, 64 bit os. running windows 8. 3 USB ports. Im not sure if they are all usb2. MY problem is that i can't connect any of my external hard drives to my laptop. When I plug them in to my desktop running windows xp, and my other laptop running windows 7, everything is fine, but my laptop running windows 8 doesn't even recognize that anything is plugged in to my usb ports. I have a lot of files, pictures music, and video files that i would like to have easy access to on my new laptop.
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Oct 26, 2013
I read the tutorial on removing the Windows password requirement. I changed the settings per the example, everything seemed ok, I restarted and it logged me in as expected, but then it took me to the desktop and opened up all of my external hard drives. I then changed the setting back to requiring a password and still the same result. I have restarted several times and still the same condition.
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Sep 15, 2014
I was trying to install elementary OS alongside Windows but when the installation was finishing it crashed. When I went back to Windows my hard drive didn't appear and now it says in Manage>Storage>Disk Management Disk 1 Dynamic - Invalid i posted a picture of this.I tried with Ubuntu then on the other disk same thing happened. Is there a way to get them back to normal without losing the data?
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Aug 20, 2013
I am currently running Windows 8 64 bit and when I go to "My Computer" it is only showing my C: drive. I know my other drives (internal, external and dvd) are working because I can enter the directory name (ie. H: or E:) into the address bar and the content appears. Is there any way to fix this problem so that they show up in "My Computer"?
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Feb 4, 2014
Just purchase this HornetTek X2-U3 JBOD USB 3.0 (HT-3210U3) - 3.5" DUAL BAY - JBOD - HDD ENCLOSURES
The only reason was because I had a spare 1TB drive and 500GB drive that I wanted to span into one volume, according the product spec it supports JBOD, which from my understanding should allow hard drive spanning, I understand that if one drive goes the data is lost, but that is not a concern of mine as I have numerous backups of my data. The problem is when I try to span 2 disk I get the following error "The operation is not supported by the object"
Here's a screenshot of the drives in question :
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Sep 15, 2014
Recently upgraded to Windows OS 8.1 Pro and cannot encrypt my HP external hard drive. Encryption pauses and states that disk has errors and please run chkdsk. Ran chkdsk and no errors found. Had no difficulty encrypting the C drive with the OS.
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Jul 26, 2014
I used four drives in my hard-disk. I needed to extend volume for my C drive. So using the Disk management utility I was trying to shrink the drive F (as it was very next to C, as in Disk management). But something happen accidental here. I found that two of my drives E & F went missing after the operation. Also my laptop suddenly restarted (after perform a checking task). I am not sure how this happened and looking for a way to recover the lost partitions as they are seen still exist, including the data.
I was only trying to shrink around 283 mb of volume from a drive with 138 gb, as an experiment basis, to see it work. On that process the drives were lost and those are not shown into my windows now. Using a software EaseUS Partition Master, I could still see the drives still exist as they contain the data as used spaces, and also show the unallocated space of 283 mb but I am not finding a way how could I recover my partition without affecting the data.
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Jan 31, 2014
I have an ASUS RT-AC68U router with 9 DBI dual band antennas. I need a program that allows me to copy and paste files to the external hard drives which are connected to the router's USB ports. An example of the application I am seeking is called "Silex Virtual Link", I need one like this, I used to use this 1 on my old D-Link DIR-825 router but it is not working with my new ASUS router and ASUS tech support couldn't solve anything.
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Nov 10, 2013
I am trying to find a definitive answer to the question of mapping external hard drives. I have 4 external hard drives and would like to know if there is benefit in mapping them or not. Is there benefit in speed/response etc.... I do a lot of video streaming through media centre to xbox 360.
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Dec 15, 2013
I just got a refurbished ASUS K75DE laptop, and it came with Windows 8 on it. I am wanting to run a dual boot with Win7, so I disabled fast-boot just fine, and went into the UEFI BIOS and disabled the secure boot.
While I was there, I did like I have always done and set a BIOS boot-up password. I then proceed to boot to my Win7 installer USB Flash drive, but I was running low on battery power so I aborted the install and shut the computer down to try again later.
Now however when I get into BIOS to select boot priority, all options are grayed out except for system time and a few other non-essentials. At the bottom of the first BIOS screen it says "User Level : User" and I can't seem to find a way to reverse this issue. So now I'm stuck, can't boot to anything but the HDD because it is first by default.
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Jun 28, 2013
I have installed Blue 8.1 on a separate drive in my system along side 8.0. When I restart the 8.0 boots unless I manually select the 8.1 drive in bios. How can I alter the Boot menu to add the option to boot from either OS?
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Feb 18, 2013
Late last Fall I bought a new Desktop, an HP H81414, with Windows 8 installed with the intention of installing Windows 7 on an SSD. I migrated Window 8 to an SSD, removed that from the system, installed new SSD and put Windows 7 on it. Both worked fine. I wound up with 2 SSD's. capable of running on the EFI BIOS machine with Secure Boot turned off. I later bought a new laptop with Windows 8. I found the Win 8 with Classic Shell to be very acceptable.
What I would like to do now ,if possible, is to mount both SSD's in the HP case and switch to either one of them at boot.
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May 16, 2014
Just installed 8.1 on one of my machines. The 100 mb "system reserved" boot partition is showing up as drive E in the drives. It does not show on my other Win 8 machine. Why would this be? Is there some way to hide it?
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Jan 10, 2014
I've tried everything. Basically it wont boot when using a USB 3.0 flash drive (which is faster than the external usb 3 hard drive am using) It simply stalls on the boot image part (The blue windows icon). And on my laptop it gives a blue screen type error. Yet wont let me boot into safe mode when using flash drive. However when I use external drive it works fine although the performance isn't great.
At first I though it could have been an issue with the boot/350mb partition so I copied that over. Still the same. I have also tried a fresh windows to go install with same results.
USB Stick: Patriot USB 3 45MB Write/160MB Read
USB HDD: External Case (USB3) With Toshiba 7200 Laptop Drive (ASMT 2105)
How to resolve this?
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Apr 28, 2014
I had windows 7 running on my computer. When windows 8 came out I used a second harddrive as the windows 8 installation drive. Windows 8 automatically setup a dual boot system where every time I started the computer it took me a windows screen where I could select either windows 7 or windows 8. This has been going on since Windows 8 was released.
I decided it was getting old so I decided it was time to remove the old windows 7 harddrive. I tried doing it inside the windows 8 dual boot screen but could not find an option. So I decided to reformat the windows 7 harddrive. I did this in command prompt mode. After doing so when my computer restarted it said it could not find any harddrive to boot. Windows 8 is installed on the other harddrive, the one that was not reformatted. So how do I get it to start using that harddrive as the boot drive? I checked my bios and even physically disconnected the old HD that had windows 7 on it, but none of that seemed to work even though the Windows 8 HD is definitely in the boot order in the bios.
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Jul 11, 2014
I recently felt the urge to experiment with Linux and installed Ubuntu Mint and tried to set up dual booting.
However I seem to have only suceeded in preventing Windows booting at all. I cannot get into the recovery drive to undo my wrong doing.
How can I reset the windows boot manager without access to windows or recovery partitions?
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Jun 8, 2013
I am dual booting Windows 8 and win7. I actually have Windows 8 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 Windows 8 running for about a week now. I purchased another hard drive for Windows 8 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 Windows 8, powering down system, swap boot drive, boot Win7) the system always says that there are problems on the 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 10-12 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 reboot 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.
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Dec 11, 2013
I cloned my existing Windows installation (8.1 pro, 32 bit) onto my new SSD. I got everything up and running, and I still have my old Windows installation on one of the partitions of my HDD.
Can I turn this setup into a dual boot?
I think this could be useful, in case the new installation gets borked, or in order to run an effective malware scan on the SSD, etc.
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May 31, 2013
I have windows 8 to go on my 320 GB USB harddrive and I would like to be able to boot from the disk a choose if I waht to boot from windows 8 to go or another partition where I have my ghost.
I'm not sure how to go about making a dual boot when it is a USB harddisk.
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Dec 13, 2012
i had windows 7 installed and i installed windows 8 on my other partition and after some days i did a format on win7 partition but the dual boot menu is still there any solution to remove that ?
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Apr 11, 2013
I'm having a hard time with WinPE 4.0. For starters, my USB is 128GB, which means I have to use exFAT - according to some people, it should work, but others say it won't. So far no luck.
Also, it's my only USB and any way to boot both x86 and x64 WinPE 4.0 from it. Even if I have to use separate partitions, that would be fine.
Finally, I have to do this in UEFI mode.... BIOS won't work on the device I'm trying to boot to.
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