Dual booting Win10 from an image on two separate disks

Hello Forum!

Without giving a long back story like I started with, let's just say, Microsoft updates, audio, latency, WTF is going on and why didn't I disable automatic updates?

Way back when, I cloned my old HDD's to SSD's and didn't realize that I lost my system reserved partition so Windows made my E drive (separate disk) system and active. Now that I've successfully created a proper SRP on the same disk as Windows and made it system and active, I tried and failed to restore an older image prior to release 1903 to a different SSD for dual booting. Actually it's the disk E I formatted to get rid of the system/active status.

I'm no stranger to dual booting but I now spend all of my time as a solutions engineer in the MS cloud space with limited time for tinkering around unless it's music so I'm obviously missing something which prompted me to create this thread.

I restored my older image to this other SSD and after some time troubleshooting, I was finally prompted to pick which OS to boot to. Booting to my current build works just fine but if I choose the other OS, I get a black screen and nothing ever happens or it might reboot on me.

I can't remember if I needed another SRP on that new drive so I created one anyway and still can't boot into that OS. I'm not using UEFI even though I could but why add more to my plate? Both drives are selected in the BIOS with the proper boot order and both are MBR.

In Disk Management, I see disk 0 (my main OS) is properly set with its SRP and C as Boot, Page, Primary. Disk 1 has an SRP with no system or active status but D (restored OS) on the same disk is set to active.

I know this is doable and I'm overlooking something. I'm not sure if I need two SRP's or if the main one will work. I don't want to start setting things active unless I'm sure it won't cause me more issues. Any advice and assistance is greatly appreciated! TYIA

-JJ

Welcome to the forum. If you clone a disk and leave it in the system it will have the same disk signature as the boot drive and hence windows will be confused as to it they are one drive. If you can post a screenshot from disk manager showing all the details so we can see can you confirm the second drive boots ok if it the only drive?

Hey Samurai,

That's what I figured since it's an image of the current OS but I was hoping to remedy that by creating it's own SRP.

I can definitely post a screen shot a little later tonight after I put my son to bed and hang with the wife.

How did you set up the dual booting? Using the bcdboot command?

Samuria said:

Welcome to the forum. If you clone a disk and leave it in the system it will have the same disk signature as the boot drive and hence windows will be confused as to it they are one drive. If you can post a screenshot from disk manager showing all the details so we can see can you confirm the second drive boots ok if it the only drive?

Here you go


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NavyLCDR said:

How did you set up the dual booting? Using the bcdboot command?

Hey Navy,

I've tried quite a few options. Now if I run the setup disk and use the command prompt to fix the boot, it shows zero windows installations found.

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Bump.... Did I lose everyone?

Quick update. The main reason I wanted to dual boot was to see what version of Win10 they were running. Ever since 1903 was released, I've read tons of articles about all these issues 1903 was bringing to end users but I never noticed one until I decided to build a home studio for mixing and production. That's when I started noticing strange latency and found I'm not alone with this release.

Instead of just restoring to my main disk to avoid reinstalling a ton of apps and VPN's for client access, I went the dual boot route to check and test if I had the same latency issues pre-1903.

Last night I started working on some stuff and launched LatencyMon for the heck of it while I opened audio software, browsed and just did normal stuff. This time, LM still showed latency that apparently is not present pre-1903 but I never once went above the threshold that warned my system was not suitable for audio.

I've done nothing outside of correcting the SRP for my main OS and removing the system/active status from the other disk. I still want to dual boot if possible though. Just so I can if needed.

From your screenshot above to set up dual booting, open a Command Prompt (Admin) and run:
bcdboot D:\Windows /d /addlast

NavyLCDR said:

From your screenshot above to set up dual booting, open a Command Prompt (Admin) and run:
bcdboot D:\Windows /d /addlast

I had tried this but not after making changes. Just did and the same results as before and to add to it, I can't select my OS unless I have a wired keyboard. Just went all wireless to get the cords out of the way for my audio gear. Once I did select my 2nd OS, I did get further with a partial windows loading screen but then it went all black. I let it sit like that for about 10 minutes until I reset the PC.