Is it or is it not possible to configure a PC with multiple hard drives selectively to boot off a system I've cloned to another partition on another hard drive? If it's not possible then it would explain why it did something strange when I tried it. It looked like it worked but it was slow for some actions and according to the disk label it still thinks its booted off the original one. It works when the multiple systems are on separate partitions on the SAME hard disk. That I can live with as I can then clone the whole hard disk to another hard disk to give me redundancy in case of a hard disk failure.
multi-boot off multiple hard drives
- Thread starter fan42025
- Start date
There's no logical difference whether the OS's share a drive or not, but "cloning" implies an identical bit for bit copy of the OS including the BCD, which will cause a problem because the BCD entries do not contain disk letters (EasyBCD translates the unintelligible ID hash to a disk letter for your ease and convenience). The ID hash contains the unique serial number of the OS device, i.e. the new clone will still be pointing at the original HDD not at itself.
You will need to start EastBCD, point it at the cloned BCD (File > Select BCD store) and in that BCD, delete the entry for the cloned OS and add it again. EasyBCD will look up the correct hash in the registry and create a corrected entry for you.
You will need to start EastBCD, point it at the cloned BCD (File > Select BCD store) and in that BCD, delete the entry for the cloned OS and add it again. EasyBCD will look up the correct hash in the registry and create a corrected entry for you.
Not unless it has a boot partition that is correctly configured with the relevant BCD data to load the copy of Windows on that second disk. You would be able to boot from the second disk after taking corrective measures such as those described in our recovery document here: Fixing the Windows Bootloader via the setup DVD