Trouble dual booting Windows 10 ... PC keeps restarting.

Frozen_up_north

Have you tried installing the secondary O/S under Oracle Virtual Box? It’s free, runs like greased lightning and avoids dual boot. I use it to run Windows XP 32 bit in an isolated box under Win 10 Pro 64 bit. You can isolate the O/S from the web, so don’t need to patch it or run any A/V on it.

https://www.virtualbox.org/

JustAnotherSaver

Sorry, i don't want to go down the Virtual Machine route.

I know it's a possibility but it's not one i want i'm afraid. Tried Virtual Machines. My opinion is they're slow. At least slower than they would be if they were installed direct to the HDD/SSD and the difference is noticeable to me. Whether i'm doing it wrong or what i don't know, but i give plenty of RAM and have tweaked other settings to make it faster and it's still no good or rather not as fast as i want.

Like i said, maybe i set it up wrong but i'm also well conscious of the fact that if i don't 'get it' quick enough for some people then they just grumble that i'm not 'getting on with it' and i'm not about to start dealing with someones impatience of how quick i grasp whatever they're saying. Been there & had enough of that.

Like i said, if worst comes to the worse then i'll go Windows 7 & 10 dual boot. Ideally i want 10 & 10 though.

a

Think it was mentioned to in that past to you that especially now having multiple os partitions is a bit troublesome, and that you should be using virtualization, or possibly a separate drive. Yes, you once could easily put multiple os'es on one disk, but now even a basic windows install creates 4 partitions. If my memory serves me well this is not your first rodeo with partition problems either.

People also warned you first time around it was going to be a potential problem too, and you probably should not do it.

Every simple new windows 10 gpt install needs 4 partitions, and yes, you will only see the c: drive. Similar versions of the same os possibly using the same partitions. When things go wrong, things may point to the wrong partition and amend it, is a recipe for disaster. Me personally I do not have 4 partitions, but 5; thanks to one left over from a windows 7 upgrade, and yes for 1gb I am too afraid to delete it and potentially mess up my whole setup. Sleeping dogs and that

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/configure-uefigpt-based-hard-drive-partitions

JustAnotherSaver

Thanks for the thing. Problem is i looked at it and my head just went to mush, probably the same way it would do if i was given a book in Chinese and told to read it.

You say it's troublesome, but i note you didn't say that what i'm looking to achieve is impossible.

I see when i create 1 partition, or install to the disk first off, it creates an additional partition that i think is 500mb.

When i free up space for another install (so you'll have the 500mb created partition, plus my OS partition, plus the free space partition) and install to the free space, i don't notice it creating a 4th partition (like a second 500mb for example). This may be normal but i'm only mentioning this as you say it creates 4 partitions.

I can't remember what other issues i've had with partitioning to be honest. You'd have to delve in to my past threads if you wanted to highlight that but i've created 2x Windows7 partitions for the past 10 years and it's ran well so i'm not sure what problems i ran in to. I'm not saying you're wrong but it doesn't jog my memory any. Unless it was regarding removing drive letters and they randomly got reassigned one time or that one partition didn't boot and i had to insert the Windows 7 disc to repair. Aside from this i have no idea.

So to be honest i don't really know if you're saying it can be done or can't be done or what.

wongataa

To be honest what you want goes against how Windows is designed to work.  This is why you are having such trouble. The vast majority of people do not want to do what you want so which is why Windows wasn't designed to run that way.

Realistically the only options are to run an instance of Windows 10 in a virtual machine or to have two disks with a different install of Windows 10 on each on and plug the one you want to use in when you start the computer.

A VM is often slower than the host but is the slowdown really affecting what you want to do it it or is just a mild frustration?  I know you want two installs of Windows but is there any reason why you can't just use one?  Would it be easier to just get another computer?  You could use the same mouse, keyboard and monitor on both with a KVM switch.

esuhl

I've never heard of any problems that would prevent dual-booting. It shouldn't make any difference whether you're installing the same OS twice, or multiple unique OSes.  (Unless there's something uniquely peculiar about Windows 10).  Each installation would be "unaware" of the other.  The OSes should reference the drives by hardware ID, so (again, unless Win10 is uniquely stupid) it shouldn't be mixing up partitions between OSes.

You'll want to disable "Fast Startup" or "Fast Boot" (whatever it's called) when running multiple OSes.  If you don't Win10 will think there's a problem with the disk(s) and run chkdsk unnecessarily.

Did you say that everything was working fine until you used BCDEdit?  Could you boot up both OSes?  If so, perhaps you made a mistake with the command (i.e. mixing up volume/disk numbers)?

esuhl

wongataa said:

To be honest what you want goes against how Windows is designed to work.  This is why you are having such trouble. The vast majority of people do not want to do what you want so which is why Windows wasn't designed to run that way.

Sorry, but I disagree.  Multi-booting isn't that rare, and Windows should definitely be designed to work without interfering with other OSes you may have, least of all another copy of itself.

I've done it several times with Windows 7, Vista, XP, and Linux.  One popular reason to have multiple installations of the same OS would be in music/video production, where you may want to use a realtime kernel, and have no antivirus or other background apps running in one installation ...  And a second installation for normal use, web access, etc.

JustAnotherSaver

wongataa said:

To be honest what you want goes against how Windows is designed to work. 

And a car isn't designed to be remapped, but people do it and it works. I'm no car expert though so as this is the internet this is probably where you or someone will step in and tell me all about how some cars are designed to be remapped and although they'll get the point they'll go on and argue the toss anyway. So we'll try another...

The original Playstation for example, it wasn't designed to run pirated games. With the right mod chip though it did and it did them perfectly well with no issues whatsoever. Still, you get the point i'm making.

I'm well aware that most people don't have 2 installs of the same operating system on the same machine. That's precisely why i put in the original post or at least some post in Windows 10 recently not to get in to the whys and why nots. I simply wish to know if it can be done and how. When you can do so much with computing i find it difficult to believe that there isn't some way to achieve this, it's just a case of finding out what that way is.

esuhl said:

(Unless there's something uniquely peculiar about Windows 10). 

I think that's what Neil mentioned earlier. It's the only thing i can think of as why else have i been able to do it perfectly fine with Windows 7 for the past 10 years (and for Windows XP before that) yet for Windows 10 it's all of a sudden a problem.

esuhl said:

You'll want to disable "Fast Startup" or "Fast Boot" (whatever it's called) when running multiple OSes.  If you don't Win10 will think there's a problem with the disk(s) and run chkdsk unnecessarily.

Did you say that everything was working fine until you used BCDEdit?  Could you boot up both OSes?  If so, perhaps you made a mistake with the command (i.e. mixing up volume/disk numbers)?

1st para: that's what Neil suggested this morning. I tried it out but sadly it didn't solve anything. The problem persisted.

2nd para: That's what i initially thought/hoped. That was on my very first attempt before i even made this thread. My second attempt was to not mess with BCDEdit at all - it didn't make a difference.

And at any rate, i entered the command correctly, or at least as per the article i read online on how to do it.

I think the key thing (in my eyes) is also that when i changed the default Windows/partition to boot to, the partition that WAS the problem stopped being the problem and the partition that wasn't the problem became the problem if you get me? So it surely can't be a case of Bill's partition is a problem no matter what, because when i make it the default partition instead of not being default, it's no longer a problem.

So in short, no issues with the default partition but there is with the other one. I can switch them around so now Ben's partition is the default and that one will be fine but now Bill's partition will be a problem.

Neil_Jones

The only other thing I can suggest you try if you haven't tried it already is is do a "typical" dual-boot system with Windows 7 and Windows 10 alongside it, and then do an upgrade to 10 from within Windows 7.

In theory that should get you what you want.

Also which version of Windows 10 are you using?  Is it the current latest, 1909 or are you using an older version?

JustAnotherSaver

Neil_Jones said:

The only other thing I can suggest you try if you haven't tried it already is is do a "typical" dual-boot system with Windows 7 and Windows 10 alongside it, and then do an upgrade to 10 from within Windows 7.

In theory that should get you what you want.

Actually i probably should dummy run 7 alongside 10 rather than assuming it'll work because they're different. I assumed 10 and 10 would work and that didn't go to well.

Not keen on doing an upgrade though. I much prefer a clean install.

Not only that but i can't help but think it should be possible. That's not me saying any of you are wrong, far from it. It's just a question of finding out how it can be done.

Neil_Jones said:

Also which version of Windows 10 are you using?  Is it the current latest, 1909 or are you using an older version?

I just went to the MS website a few days ago, downloaded that media tool to make a bootable USB and then have Windows put to it so whatever version it will have given me.