Two windows 8 Harddrives on the same PC

Ezeus

New Member
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I have a pc with 4 drives. And I got a new job, working from home and i wanted to make one of the drives just for work. It was one that i had windows 7 one and no longer used after i bought an ssd an put windows 8 on it. I am really liking 8 and so I put 8 on the second drive that had windows 7 on it. It all worked fine, but when i tried to have two windows 8 drives on the same pc it made the drives unbootable. I had to re install windows on both drives again. I did some reading and i think its the fast boot feature of windows 8 that's causing the issue. I disabled fast boot on both hard drives. And before I plug them both in at the same time. I want to make sure that im not going to loos all my data again.

thanks for any help.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8
You can do that, but it will foul up your Boot Loader.

For instance, Windows 8's boot loader has to be on the first drive in the system. If the 2nd Windows 8 system was put in place of the original, then you have to rebuild the bootloader.

You have to find a Windows 8 Install Disk, boot to it, and get into Command Prompt. Run Bootrec /Scanos and it will find all of the Windows Installations, then rebuild the bootloader to allow you to boot to both of them, by choosing which one you want in the Boot GUI.

Also, Bootrec will not be in the Sources path which is shown in the command prompt. You have to run it from the Windows/System32 folder of either of the Windows 8 System drives.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 Pro with Media Center/Windows 7
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Asus M2N-MX SE Plus § DualCore AMD Athlon 64 X2, 2300 MHz (11.5 x 200) 4400+ § Corsair Value Select
    CPU
    AMD 4400+/4200+
    Motherboard
    Asus M2N-MX SE Plus/Asus A8M2N-LA (NodusM)
    Memory
    2 GB/3GB
    Graphics Card(s)
    GeForce 8400 GS/GeForce 210
    Sound Card
    nVIDIA GT218 - High Definition Audio Controller
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Hitachi 40" LCD HDTV
    Screen Resolution
    "1842 x 1036"
    Hard Drives
    WDC WD50 00AAKS-007AA SCSI Disk Device
    ST1000DL 002-9TT153 SCSI Disk Device
    WDC WD3200AAJB-00J3A0 ATA Device
    WDC WD32 WD-WCAPZ2942630 USB Device
    WD My Book 1140 USB Device
    PSU
    Works 550w
    Case
    MSI "M-Box"
    Cooling
    Water Cooled
    Keyboard
    Dell Keyboard
    Mouse
    Microsoft Intellimouse
    Internet Speed
    Cable Medium Speed
    Browser
    Chrome/IE 10
    Antivirus
    Eset NOD32 6.x/Win Defend
    Other Info
    Recently lost my Windows 8 on my main PC, had to go back to Windows 7.
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