Questions on Dual Booting Windows 7 on two hard drives and their interaction with secondary storage hard drives.

TechPlayer

Reputable
May 17, 2016
4
0
4,510
Okay so I have a question for the Tom's Hardware community. I currently am running a computer for personal use. The operating system is Windows 7 Ultimate. I have a 1TB Seagate Hard Drive dedicated to the OS. I think it's 5800rpms. My storage hard drives for games(except for games that require to be installed on the C: Drive), movies, and pictures are on three 698GB Western Digital Hard drives(all quite full). Don't remember their RPMs. My ram is 16gb, and I have a MSI Mpower z77 and I have an Ivy Bridge processor 3.50ghz. While all this information not be necessary to the question I figured it would give you guys a better picture of what I'm wanting to do.

Recently I got a job doing data processing and eventually the work is going to require me to work at home, since I'm currently working at my bosses personal office space near his house. Most correspondence with employees will be online. And the sharing of data between employees will be on cloud based systems like G-drive or media fire, but will require to be downloaded to my local computer to process and reorganize and then re-uploaded back to the cloud sharing area AND to our business's database.

With that being said, my boss doesn't want me to have to use my personal computer I use for fun to use for work. Since I don't have the money for a new build, I figured why not dual boot. Now I've raided in the past and also done partitions to make the main OS drive read as two. I've used virtual machines to dual boot or attempted partitions with one hard drive, but that never works well for me in the end. I've had problems with data recovery when the hard drive or power supply in my computer goes bad. Or for some reason the partitions end up corrupting later on due to heavy management of data and then I lost everything.

I'd rather not go through that again. So for this time around I'm dual booting on two separate drives. But I'm at a loss here since I've never dual booted from two physical drives before and don't know the best way to go about this. This is my preference to doing things since I'm very paranoid.

I'm going to be buying another hard drive next week. I'm debating over a normal hard drive of about 2TB to 4TB of storage and possibly 7200rpm or a 2TB SSD, since my work does data processing, creating, deleting and rewriting large amounts of data(excel spreadsheets, images resizing, code script files) multiple times a day.

I'll be installing on that another Windows 7 Ultimate operating system (IF I can find one), since that's what the work place uses, and features that are in Windows 7 needed for work were deprecated or removed in Windows 8.1 and 10.

So when I do get the dual boot going and both Operating systems installed, one will be for work and one will be for play.

Question 1. Will I be able to label each hard drive so that when the boot menu comes up to chose from, can I have a unique label instead of like ST005950985 and ST0073930? Like Windows 7 (Work) and Windows 7 (Personal)? I will forget which hard drive is which unless it has a unique labeling system. Is this possible?

While my motherboard has the option to make secondary hard drive hot-swappable, there is a problem on why I haven't gotten used this feature. When internal hard drives become hot-swappable they are read like externals, meaning you can remove said device. The motherboard driver update intended to fix bugs for the hot-swap option breaks it even more. For some reason after I update the drivers for hotswapping the icon that is supposed to make the internals read like externals and be able to disabled removed, never appears. So I have no way to remove a selected hot-swappable hard drive when my computer is on. This leads into my second question.

Question 2. Can I have just one of the Windows OS drives read my secondary internal hard drives and the other OS hard drive not read the secondary internal hard drives? You probably guessed, I'd like to not have the operating system that is on the hard drive dedicated for work be reading my secondary hard drives. I would just like the OS hard drive dedicated for personal use to read my secondary drives and the Work OS hard drive not read my hard drives.

I'd rather not unassign the drive letters and reassign the drive letters each time as this is a big hassle when it comes to linking.So in more detail, I need the work OS hard drive to completely ignore my secondary hard drives hard drive as if they aren't even there. No caching, no indexing. I don't want any data being saved on the work OS drive as I'll need every bit of space I can. My job deals with processing a whole Terabyte of data at times. Also I need the OS hard drives to NOT read or even recognize each other. Again, no caching, no indexing, completely invisible as if they aren't even in the computer when one OS is booted. (I.E. I'm on the Personal OS drive and inside windows but I don't want to see the work OS drive show up as a secondary drive in My Computer.)

Question 3. I've read stuff about how when dual booting, on a failure this can cause corruption of the second bootable operating system. Is this true for dual booting between two physical drives? Can there be corruption from one cause corruption of the other OS?

I hope I'm not shooting for the moon. I know this was as long question, but if anyone has a good solution to dual boot between two different OS hard drives, and ease my paranoia, that would be great.
 
If you install each OS on it's respective disk while it is the only disk connected than no mixing and interaction with other drives is possible.
You can choose which drive to BOOT from thru BIOS or it's fast boot device menu. Or, you can use http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/ to set up boot menu.
In each OS you can hide any other drive that is connected at the time.
When you BOOT from each drive it will be C: drive, other drives/partitions would be auto assigned own letters but you can change that easily.
 
While I believe I have a generalized idea of your forthcoming situation from your post, I'm not sure I clearly understand your *precise* requirements. So I'm uncertain as to whether what I'm going to suggest is a viable option for you to consider.

You're obviously working with a desktop PC so the crucial question is does your PC case contain a vacant 5 1/4" bay that you could utilize to install a mobile rack to house a removable HDD? Assuming it does, you may wish to consider the following...

(The following is a blurb we prepared for members of our computer club re the advantages of equipping one's PC with one or more mobile racks to house removable HDD/SSDs)...

We equip every PC we build with at least one mobile rack to house a removable HDD/SSD. The advantages of this configuration for a PC user are enormous.

Here's the mobile rack we've been using for quite a number of years...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817995104

1. The beauty of installing removable HDD/SSDs in a desktop PC is that the user can easily work with multiple installed drives, each effectively isolated (when desired) from any other installed drive. Thus, multiple operating systems may be installed on different drives installed in the system and no conflicts will arise from this situation since each drive can be completely isolated both physically & electrically from another. In addition, the use of removable drives facilitates accommodating different storage/backup needs that the user may desire since it's a simple matter to add, remove, modify a HDD/SSD using a removable disk drive in the system.

2. With removable HDD/SSDs desktop PC users have an UNLIMITED number of drives to work with should they choose without the need for opening their computer cases to install (or remove) the drive in the machine. Again, each removable drive is effectively isolated from the other internally-connected drives at the user's option.

3. Assuming the drive in the mobile rack contains an OS, simply by pressing its power switch the user can thus boot to this drive or that drive without the need for any "bootloader" or any other multi-booting software, as well as avoiding the need (in most cases) to access the motherboard's BIOS to change the boot priority order in order to boot to this or that particular HDD that contains a different OS.

4. Should a removable HDD/SSD become defective/dysfunctional that needs to be removed & replaced in the system, it's a simple & quick process for a user to remove & replace it from the comfort of his or her computer chair without the need of disconnecting/uninstalling the disk from the motherboard's internal SATA connector.

The mobile rack we use is a two-piece affair - a removable tray and the rack itself which is affixed to the desktop PC's 5 1/4" bay (identical to installing an optical drive or some such 5 1/4" device). This model contains a small fan that is dead silent in operation.

This particular mobile rack model is equipped with an ON-OFF power switch button, a most desirable feature in our opinion. Assuming a user is working with multiple removable hard drives in their mobile racks (or has also installed a fixed internally-connected hard drive), it's a simple matter to press the ON-OFF button and "on-the-fly" temporarily disable one or more of the mobile rack's hard drives without the need of using the rack's lever to remove the rack's tray (caddy) containing the HDD from the rack's internal SATA power/data connectors.

Of course should the user choose to do so it's a relatively simple matter to press the removable tray's lever release button and thus physically disconnect the removable tray containing the tray's HDD/SSD SATA data/power connectors from the mobile rack's connectors. A simple pull of the tray's lever is all that is necessary.

So can you see the advantages in your situation? In effect, you would be able to electrically connect or disconnect your HDD from the OS's internal system by a simple push of the rack's power button. Should you desire to physically remove the HDD from the system all that would be necessary is a pull on the removable tray's lever and out would come the removable tray with the installed HDD.

And should you desire to use additional HDDs for one reason or another, simply remove the present disk from the tray and plop a different one in. Thus, you would have an UNLIMITED number of drives at your disposal.

So with a removable HDD, you get the speed advantages of an internally-connected drive when you need it and the absolute security of that disk by easily disconnecting/uninstalling the disk from the system whenever you need to.

In your situation the added cost involved to equip your PC with a mobile rack (assuming it's the model we recommend) would be about $23.
 

TechPlayer

Reputable
May 17, 2016
4
0
4,510
Looks Like a bootrack might be an option. Though I do have hotswap racks built into my current Thermaltake Level 10 Snow edition case. I like the idea of having to turn off power to particular hard drive, but I don't understand the boot rack setup and how many sata slots on the motherboard it would take up.

So the question 3 was implying, of I'm going to be using the bios boot manager, since the OS drive will recognize each other in "My Computer/Computer" in Windows, does that mean that if the Work dedicated Windows 7 OS HDD goes bad, how big is the risk of it corrupting my Personal activity dedicated Windows OS HDD?

In question 2 also, I was saying, if I'm using bios boot manager, when the boot menu comes up asking me which OS choose, can I rename them from just reading "Windows 7" and "Windows 7". The more information I learn the better. When I get all the information I'll make my decision on what to do.