Dual Booting Win10 and W11 from two separate drives

[owlhandler]

I have two separate drives:

SATA SSD - Windows 10 (Legacy Mode)
NVMe SSD - Windows 11 (UEFI, GPT volume)

I have a motherboard (Evga z490) with a UEFI firmware. I installed Win10 under legacy boot mode. When Win11 came along installed it with secure boot enabled. I'm looking for a quicker way to switch between the two. Right now I go into the UEFI/BIOS settings to switch profiles that change drive priority and turn on or off secure boot.

On a whim I installed EasyBCD on the Win 10 drive and it will let me add the drive with Win11 to the boot menu. When I restart, I can choose that option and Win 11 actually boots up fine. msinfo confirms though that the Win11 is in 'legacy' mode. Somewhat confusing after reading this in the wiki "However, your Windows installation is already in UEFI/GPT mode, and UEFI installations of Windows cannot be booted via the legacy MBR approach!, EasyBCD and UEFI.

1. Why am I able to boot Win 11 in legacy mode with the above approach?

2. Is there some configuration that will let me secure boot Win 11 and let me choose to run Win 10 when I please without resorting to re configuring the UEFI/BIOS setting each time?


Thank you for your time

 

[owlhandler]

Well I didn't quite get the answer I wanted but for now I ended up converting my SATA SSD to a GPT drive using the MBR2GPT tool available in windows though command line.

Once the drive was GPT, I could switch my computer firmware to UEFI only and with BCD gives me a boot menu entry to choose which OS I want to boot. I no longer have to specifically switch from legacy and UEFI in the firmware, etc.