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Question
Saturday, October 22, 2016 10:47 AM
I have a Dell Alienware laptop with two hard drives installed, the original HDD and a new Samsung SSD installed, both 250GB. Each harddrive has Windows 10 installed but continuously seems to go into a non-bootable state which seems to be tied to when I change the boot order of the drives in the BIOS to boot from one drive or the other.
The original HDD drive was an upgrade of Windows 7 to 8.1 to 10 while the new SSD was created using a Macrium image of the old one. After repeated failures I rebuilt the new one using the Windows 10 media recovery to install from scratch from a USB flash drive. Everything was working well with the new drive, Windows running faster etc but then I tried to boot from the old HDD drive to find it doesnt boot so I went back to the new drive to find it also doesnt boot!! Each time it breaks like this it goes into a continuous loop saying Windows needs recovered but the recovery fails.
My understanding of having two separate hard drives is that they are separate and whichever one appears first in the BIOS is the that is booted from and should not affect the other. My experience is that booting from one drive seems to somehow break the other.
Is anyone able to explain why this is happening?
All replies (6)
Sunday, October 23, 2016 9:10 PM ✅Answered
I'm afraid it would be no use that you have two same OSs in one PC. With dual boot, we usually install different OSs, eg. (Windows 7 and Windows 10), (Windows and Linux), or (Windows 10 RTM and Windows 10 Insider Preview).
You have one genuine Windows in HDD and its clone in SSD. It is NOT dual boot. If you want to do a dual boot, please "install" Windows 10 into HDD, while booting from SSD, vice versa.
I suppose your issue causes from two Windows have the same SID internally. SID should be different with each other. (Never connect the original Windows and its clone in the same computer.)
Tuesday, October 25, 2016 4:26 AM ✅Answered
Hi CTechnetC,
How many product keys you have got?
As Ashidacchi pointed out, one product key is only available for one installation. In addition, cloning the hard drive is not an official method to install Windows and it is out of the support scope.
It you want to dual boot the machine, please ensure you have got two product keys for each installation.
Best regards
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Sunday, October 23, 2016 4:50 AM
Hi CTechnetC,
I'd like to make it clear.
- Do you want to boot from the new SSD at all times, instead from the old HDD?
- Do you want to switch booting between two drives? i.e. Do you want Dual boot?
Regards,
Ashidacchi
Sunday, October 23, 2016 2:54 PM
Hi, thanks for the reply.
I am hoping to have a dual boot so that I can choose which drive to boot from (via the BIOS) but both booting into the same Windows OS version and state.
I cant understand why booting from one drive seems to cause issues the next time the other drive is used. I noticed on one occasion that the Users folder of the second drive had completely disappeared despite it having been fine the last time it was used. Its as if Windows when booted from one drive is somehow using the other drive to write data and consequently corrupting the Windows install on it. I am at a loss as to what is going on.
Tuesday, October 25, 2016 1:09 PM
Hi, thanks again for responding.
The idea was to use one of the drives (the HDD) as a backup device which would only be used occasionally if and when problems arose with the original.
I thought with only one drive ever being in use which has the same OS, files etc this would count as one installation/license so thanks for bringing the license issue to my attention (MeipoXu too)
Im still not sure that even the same SID explains the behavior I am experiencing. While I did initially build the SSD drive using a cloned image of the HDD I did in the end do a complete clean Windows 10 install onto it via the Windows recovery media tool. This new build functioned fine until I tried to boot from the old HDD after which the SSD would not boot. I would have expected if there were SID or licensing or other such issues that the current booted disk would be the one to be affected i.e. when booting from one disk there should be zero updates at all to the other drive and hence it should boot normally (unless the changes are made while it is being used and only become evident on the next bootup [which fails])
From what you have said is it possible that there is an update happening on Microsoft's servers over the Internet and these are queried on boot up and hence affect the boot of the drive even although the data on the drive has not been changed? In this case is taking a snapshot image a viable backup/restore strategy using 3rd party tools such as Macrium? Either that or the booted disk is making changes to the other disk (which was my original suspicion).
I understand there is a 30 day grace period for the Windows installations so I guess I will now need a different backup solution anyway for when I fall outwith that and given two drives are not supported.
Again thanks for the responses.
Friday, October 28, 2016 11:54 AM
As I have not had any further replies I will mark the response above as an answer as while it did not answer my original query it has helped provide some information to allow me to form a different solution.
Thanks to those that replied