Setting a boot manager for two INDEPENDENTLY installed, physical disks

J

jwesp61

Member
Hi,

i may have a little bit a special question, but maybe for the support professionals it's also just a piece of cake. I searched the web but could not find an answer to my "challenge":

I have three pc's that were sold to me with Win 7 installed and a license-card that allows for upgrading to Win 10.

On all of these PC's, a number of "special" programs, some as services are running and it's not 100% clear if all will run under Win 10. So, I would like to have kind of a grant period to test everything intensively and be able to choose the OS on boot.

My idea is the following (for each PC):

  • have a second HDD/SSD
  • clone the existing W7 installation to the new disk
  • uninstall one of them
  • install Win 10 update on the residing disk
  • install the old disk again

AND NOW ... HOW TO DO THAT:

- install a boot manager - post installation (or, if necessary also do it BEFORE the above said upgrade) - that allows me to select which of the installations to run upon boot time.

Also, by having two physical separated disks, I hope to cirumvent the known "Chkdsk" problems of a "classical" dual-boot Win 10 installation.

Can that be achieved using EasyBCD? And if so, is there an "step-by-step" tutorial to be found?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help.
 
Last edited:
You don't need to "install" a boot manager.
The MS bootmgr does the dual booting.
EasyBCD is not a boot manager, it's a Windows .NET application which enables you to manage the contents of MS bootmgr's BCD store
Do your 5 steps above then boot W10 and install EasyBCD.
Open EasyBCD and use it to add an entry for W7 to the W10 BCD pointing to the disk letter that W10 calls the other HDD containing W7.
neosmart.net

Adding Entries

All operations regarding the addition of new entries to the EasyBCD menu and the BCD store can be performed from the “Add New Entry” page of EasyBCD (as selected from the “EasyBCD…
neosmart.net
 
Thanks a lot for the quick reply. I was not aware that W10 will create a boot manager when upgrading from W7 (that currently has NONE).

That's why I assumed that I need a "special step" to create that.
 
One additional question: for the time being, I assume to use more Win7 for a while. Therefor, most likely, Win 10 will be on a (slower) Harddirve, Win 7 on the (faster) SSD. As the boot manager is only used for a very short while to find W7 being on another disk, that "slow" HDD will not slow down the whole process and performance of the system, right?
 
If you ever expect to install Win 11 in protected mode then you absolutely need a boot manager OR use F8 or F10 or what ever key is prescribed / assigned by the motherboard BIOS for bringing up BBM every time to select the boot drive. The sad part is ALL the drives will be visible and you won't have any choice of isolating any individual setup.

If you go with something like Boot It Bare Metal by TeraByteUnlimited then you can really setup the entire system as per your preferences.
 
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