Can you dual boot two identical windows installations on separate drives on the same PC?

Hello, Duc Sy.

We appreciate you posting in Microsoft Community.

Benefiting from your detailed description, I note that you wish to use a dual system on your computer.

While I would love to help you directly with this issue, it may not be properly resolved in this community given the specialized nature of this issue.

From personal experience, we usually split an SSD into two partitions, then after installing a WINDOWS system, we use the second partition to install WINDOWS again, and then use WINRE to repair the multiple boot partitions.

Of course, using multiple SSDs for this is also a possibility.

I noticed that you are also a professional user, this problem question is more suitable to be posted on Microsoft Learn, as there are more users posting these questions there, and you can click on “Ask a question”, where there are experts who can provide more professional solutions.

Attached is a link of learn:
https://learn.microsoft.com/answers/

And a post for reference:

How do I have 2 operating system software on my computer at the same time. I have windows 11 running on it at the moment. I want to run windows 10 and 11 separately on the one drive c drive and I can select what operating system I want to use. on boot res - Microsoft Q&A

Thank you for your cooperation.

Best Regards.

Jeffrey - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

Thank you Jeffrey, appreciate the response.

Take care,

D.

Hello,

I have ran into an issue recently after I added a NVME SSD into my PC and decided to reinstall windows on it to take advantage of faster read/write speeds compared to my previous OS installed on SATA SSD. I used the same copy of windows and the same windows key as the original. I really struggled to continue the installation as after launching it it restarts and then it would boot the old windows. I eventually disconnected the SATA, rebuilt bcd using command prompt and now I've got my new windows on my NVME. However, after reconnecting the SATA SSD it doesn't want to let me boot my old windows, even when selecting the windows boot manager of the SATA drive. It gives me an error and most of the time that's that, in some cases it shows me an OS selection window and I have 3 versions of Windows 10 showing, with no information on which is which. It also doesn't work when I select the SATA SSD to boot from (there are two entries for the drive, Windows boot manager and just the drive).

When I do /scanOS it correctly identifies two OSs installed, but I can't add the second and it gives the following error:

“The requested system device cannot be identified due to multiple indistinguishable devices potentially matching the identification criteria”. It also gave me an access denied error when trying the fixboot command.

Is what I'm trying to do possible?

I didn't backup everything required on my old windows, such as passwords saved in my vivaldi browser of my original windows and would like to export them. I don't think I can do that by finding a file on the SATA drive from the new windows. I think I need to open the old vivaldi and export it first. I also suppose if essential I could disconnect the NVME and do it that way as a temporary solution to get back in, but would ideally be able to boot into either without having to open the case and start manipulating hardware.

Any help would be much appreciated! :)

HW:

Asus Maximus VII Hero Mobo

i5 4690k

SATA HDD (Disk 0)

SATA SSD (Disk 1) - old Windows and second partition

NVME SSD via PCIe adapter (Disk 2) - new Windows and second partition

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