Dual boot from 2 HDD's with same OS

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Rizzler

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My old HDD is packing up so I installed a 2nd HDD with identical OS (win7) so I can re-install stuff at leisure and discard the old one later.
I can boot each one individually if I unplug the other but the BIOS will not allow me to choose one of the other HDD's as a boot option so I can't choose which option to boot with (f8 on my PC). If I boot with both plugged in the last one selected will boot and I can physically access the 2nd drive from within explorer.

I don't like EasyBCD as I've had problems in the past when I uninstalled it.

Any suggestion on how to dual boot between new and old HDD?
 
Moosedrool said:
different motherboards have different keys for choosing which drive to boot from.
Click to expand...

Yep but I can only put 1 drive in the boot section of the BIOS. Won't allow both. That's what I'm trying to solve. Perhaps it's because the OS's are identical and conflict with windows boot manager?
 
If you wanted to do a disk swop boot you should have removed disk 1 when installing. That would've preserved each bootloader as partition0 on their respective disks

To easily boot both while not changing disks you could edit the bcd to give a boot menu for partition0 or partition1

There's a few guides,easybcd helps but you can do it with notepad and some diskpart assistance
 
PsyWulf said:
If you wanted to do a disk swop boot you should have removed disk 1 when installing. That would've preserved each bootloader as partition0 on their respective disks

To easily boot both while not changing disks you could edit the bcd to give a boot menu for partition0 or partition1

There's a few guides,easybcd helps but you can do it with notepad and some diskpart assistance
Click to expand...

Thanks. I did remove disk 1 when installing. Although I can't select the disks in BIOS boot menu as 1 and 2 when I hold down F8 key it gives option to boot from either disk so basically solved. However if I boot from 2nd disk it boots and loads but after about 5 minutes after loading it reboots and loads disk 1 which is the disk selected in the BIOS. Strange.
 
Why not just clone the disk that is packing up onto the new disk..? Have you tried..? Everything will be preserved as is and you can carry on with your busy life without worries...

I am biased to Acronis Software for this purpose because I use it and it works but, there are free stuff out there which I can't recommend because I have never tried it..

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/true-image-features/
 
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