Does any one have any experience with creating a dual boot situation?
What I just did:
I had an installation of win7 on my current SSD.
I installed win7 on a new SSD.
But when I boot, I get no option to select witch drive.
Both are connected, but the only option I can find in the bios is to select the priority. So apparently its not that simple as to click a “dual-boot” option in the bios.
Any one have an idea on how I can fix this ?
Sorry man. Mac only guy here. Lot of others here on windows for sure. Just checkin in 
I would think both operating systems would have to be on the same hard drive (different partitions) , so that windows could detect the versions during boot.
If they are on separate hard drives, the only way to select flavors would be via interrupting the boot sequence and changing boot priority and that seems like a painful method.
I have seen people put a Linux os on a usb flash drive and setup Windows to check usb ports for bootable media before looking at hard drives.
Yeah I understand what you mean. The thing is, I read on support sites, that it is totaly possible with to hard drives, only know where they say how its supposed to be done. Its like its expected to just go :s
Pretty sure both OS need to be on a single boot drive. Scripting the ini files to search from multiple drives is a lot more complicated. But I will defer to the serious code-monkeys on that one…
Try downloading easy BCD and install it on your main boot hard drive. it will give you the option to set up your dual boot however you want. You can set the default drive to boot and give you 30 seconds (or whatever you want) to select which OS to boot.
You can also set up a boot record on the second drive if you want to keep them separate. But that will require you to hit F2 or F10 to chose which drive to boot.
I have my main PC set up as a triple boot. I can choose between my main win7 and windows10 upon startup. I also have a fresh win7 on another drive containing its own MBR. I have to f2 to get to it.
I also have a win7 and win10 iso on 2 separate partitions in my storage drive. So I can get into my pc in a number of ways if need be… 
But install easybcd and follow the directions in the help menu… You’ll get it up and running…
have fun
rich
Thanks man ! I will check that out
And If I ant get that to work, I just bring my computer to the store heren hehe.
Wanna mix, and not spend hours of installing shit 
So you have 5 installations ? Guess one is just for porn or ?
HOLY SHIT, that was so much more easy then I thought it would be
What the hell. I neverhad something go down that easy Just 4 clicks and the typing of a name and it was fixed!
I am forever gratefull for providing me this information man !!! You saved me at least 20€ and the time to bring it in a wait for it !
Praise Jebus, euh, rjwillow
Glad it worked out for you, Buddy…
Windows uses MBR (master boot record) which basically tells the computer where to look for the OS startup files. Perfectly fine to do it on 2 different drives, I’ve had my recording PC running that way for a while. One of the drives which is my recording PC drive can start up by itself if it is the only drive plugged, the other drive runs the boot manager for the two partitions.
The way I achieved it to install Windows on each drive as the other didn’t exist - I physically disconnected the power to the drive, so install on say drive A (drive B) disconnected, then disconnect power to drive A, connect drive B, install Windows, then connect power back to drive A and edit the boot record via boot manager (BCedit, etc…).
With this method if you music OS is on drive B, it will have a self-starting master boot record written on it, so in case something breaks on disc A you will still be able to load into your music OS by just disconnecting drive A as the boot loader in drive B is intact and set on reading only drive B as available OS.
This might be worth a read.
There are more complex options as well, as partitioning the drive and loading different OSes (Linux, different flavors of Windows). Usually windows is the “dumbest” out of the OSes so the Windows installs need to be handled first, but the Windows partitioning options are usually unfriendly to other OSes, so you’ll need to create a bootable drive or USB stick with a partition manager program, like the excellent Gparted http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ , which you use to partition the drive, and then you reboot and install Windows first into one of the partitions and then load your Linux distro which usua;;y in most cases finds and creates a boot option into your Windows partition through one of the Linux boot manager (LILO, etc.). I’d be glad to go into more detail if needed.
You can do the same thing AND keep both drives connected with MBR on each drive. Then like I mentioned in the original post, you could access it thru the boot menu (F2,F10,F12 depending upon mobo). No need to disconnect/connect anything to get up and running AND you can still access file on both drives any time you need.
have fun
rich
That’s true, but I recommend the disconnect hard drive part upon installation for the less technically knowledgeable people so that way there are no mistakes where the OS goes. Could be done both way, especially if you’re doing just Windows installs. I still prefer to use Gparted to do my partitions as Windows’ partition manager is kinda sketchy and takes longer to do the work.
By the way - for those that don’t want to install second OS, you can happily get something like a Linux OS to run off of flash drive or a DVD and you just boot into it at start instead of the recording OS. Knoppix is a really good distro for that, Ubuntu and OpenSuse offer those options as well. If anyone is interested in that
Yup… I’ve got 5 drives in my main PC. 3 ssds with win7(main boot) , a clean win10 with all my daw related stuff set to dual boot. then I have a clean win7/daw on the 3rd ssd that has to be selected from the boot menu. Then I have 2 7200 drives. 1 has nothing but audio and the other is for docs/pic/vids.
I also have a partition on each of the drives with the appropriate win iso. AND I have a partition on the doc/pic drive with Ubuntu… no MBR on that drive but I can get in thru bios or with Ubuntu on a flash drive. I also have my whole daw with current config on a flash drive so I can take it from computer to computer. With all of those options, I hardly leave my main boot, even when mixing.
Oh and this is on a 7-8 year old DELL. So yes, anything can be done at this point as long as the power is stable…
Excellent info! Many thanks-- I learned something new today.
Yeah, me to