Want to boot windows 10 on one HD and 7 on another...

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hortss

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Ok a few questions here. I currently have a 500gb SSD with Windows 7 on it. I sometimes work from home and my computer has access to my work system. Even though is would be near impossible for someone not knowing how, it makes me paranoid. I have a lot of people in my house and I don't want to take any chances. Currently I have the drive fully encrypted, so it would be impossible without the passphrase to access, but I hate having to enter the phrase every time and I feel like a jerk that I can't share my PC.

I just bought another copy of Windows 7, that I plan to upgrade to Windows 10, and a 1tb SSD. I want to keep my current SSD with windows 7 intact and install the new copy of 7 on the new drive, and make that my new primary. I don't want the option to come up as to which drive/OS to boot into, I want it to just boot into the new drive unless I go into the boot menu at startup and choose the encrypted drive. How would I go about this? That way I don't have to worry about someone using my pc, they would just boot into the main drive and have no access to anything work related.

Another issue I am worrying about complicating things, I have 2 standard HDDs currently installed along with the SSD. I have files on one of the HDDs that I need to access from my current SSD, and the other one I want to use to backup the new SSD, but I will make it external. Am I going to mess anything up when I move the drives around? I was thinking I would leave the SSD and it's backup drive where they are, and put the new SSD where I currently have the backup drive I am going to make external. Good idea?
 
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To dictate boot order, go to BIOS (usually F2). You can select where to boot from, and which drive is primary. This *will* make it boot to the second if the first fails, but otherwise it will automatically boot to your less secure one.

HFC

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Jul 22, 2014
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To dictate boot order, go to BIOS (usually F2). You can select where to boot from, and which drive is primary. This *will* make it boot to the second if the first fails, but otherwise it will automatically boot to your less secure one.
 
Solution
True that. What I have found, especially if removable disks are involved, is that the BIOS sometimes resets the boot order. In my case, putting the boot drive I want to be default on port 1 has solved the problem - every time it shuffles boot order, it starts with port 1.

Then, to get your encrypted drive, you need to enter the bios boot menu (usually F8) and select that drive. This will not affect which is your default drive.
 

HFC

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As for moving drives around, all I can say is that it hasn't been a problem for me. Your rearrangement sounds like it should work fine (to me), but with computers it's easy to have something simple throw in a great big monkey wrench. Part of the decision depends on how much troubleshooting you're willing to do if things go wrong.
 
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