hello guys
is this possible, i have 3 hard drives solid state, each one has win 10 pro on it. the reason is each hard drive is for each person in my household, is there a way that i could have all 3 hard drives hooked up at once and be able to choose which drive to boot from?, right now i just swap the sata cable to each one that is used. just was looking to see if there is an easyer way instead of changing cable all the time
Yes. Pick one that will be system, then add boot menu entries for the other two.
I see you have an Asus motherboard. You don't tell which chipset or version of the board you have. But, try hooking all drives up and start the computer. When you hear the bios beep and as soon as you see the Asus logo, start tapping F8 rapidly. You should get a one time boot menu. Just select which drive you want to boot into.
There are other ways to do it, but that is the way I prefer doing it. That is only one option.
And it may help to Label or Rename each drive with the user's name, it's on the right-click of the drive icon in File Explorer. It can use 11 or 13 characters, works on partitions also.
I agree, using the Windows boot menu is much more flexible than the UEFI boot menu.
1. Since all the drives are already bootable you should be able to just connect them all and boot up the system. The UEFI will boot to the first drive (or whatever one you specified in UEFI setup).
2. Then install EasyBCD - EasyBCD - NeoSmart Technologies . You can also do this manually with the built-in bcdedit tool on the command line but that's more complicated.
3. Open Disk Management and look at the drive letters for each Windows partition (labeling them beforehand would be useful as Berton mentioned). In this example Bob is using C:\ and Alice is using D:\.
4. Run EasyBCD. You should see one boot entry.
5. Click on Add New Entry and select the drive letter you want to add.
6. Now you should have a new entry in View Settings.
7. Reboot the system and you should see multiple entries at boot.
hi guys thanx for the info, sorry i did not post current info on my system, my current specs are:
amd ryzen 5 2600
gigabyte ab350-gaming 3
16 gig ddr4 2666
and 3 -256 gig ssd drives
i will try the multi boot, thank you all for the fast responses
It will also be quicker if you switch to the text based boot menu.
Hi there
I'd attack this from a different angle.
Have a small basic Windows system then a Virtual machine for each of the users. At login the user would be logged straight into their own VM - you can create login scripts which will load and start the relevant VM.
That way other users won't see anything of other peoples data etc.
With SSD's the overhead of running VM's is pretty minimal these days and especially with internal SSD's your VM's will be running at around 95% native OS speed - won't be noticeable for typical users.
Cheers
jimbo
Be aware, three hard drives connected at once with three copies of Windows requires you to purchase three licenses for Windows to comply with the End Users License Agreement. On this forum we are going to have to assume that you have actually paid for the three licenses for Windows because it is against the forum rules to help you violate the EULA.
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