How to boot up second HD?

Question

My laptop (I7 8550U) has space for 2 hard drives.
Primary drive has WIN 10
Secondary drive has WIN 7. I want to boot up this HD.

I have tried the BIOS menu screen (via: Settings > Recovery > Restart > Troubleshooting).
But in the BIOS Boot menu there is no option to boot the second HD because it doesn't recognize it as a distinct device.
It treats the partitions of the second HD as an extension of the primary HD.

Solutions?

Answer 1

that sounds like it has a RAID controller configured in the bios to treat the two drives as one(note be careful as the RAID way is often used to speed up the performance and turning off could serious damage your performance expected.. be aware a uefi bios wont be able to boot an mbr disk without extreme fidlling which will need undoing carefully to boot back to W10 which may remain hidden or listed as blank when in the w7 booted state. its so much trouble you need to start with a blank drive and follow the recommended to INSTALL an OS to a 2nd drive and properly dual boot from a disk that is blank first. In other words trying to shortcut that process is gonna mess things up..

Answer 2

A lot of newer machines have a "boot option" in the BIOS, (like F12 in many Dell systems). That comes up with a list of devices to boot, from which you choose the one you want.

I have 3 drives in a desktop, and installed Linux Mint on the third drive. The Linux drive, when booted, shows all operating systems on all drives, and I simply pick the one I want from the Linux boot menu (Grub).



A word of caution, Win10 may write all sorts of stuff to all drives and files to enable "Fast Boot". Win7 does not recognize this and runs a CHKDSK every time. You must disable fast boot in Win10 to avoid this confusion between Win7 and Win10

Answer 3

You did not name the brand and model number of the laptop.

You say you have two distinct hard drives, but the laptop is not set up as two distinct hard drives.

If the second HDD is partitioned, it should see more than two drives.

The problem is likely in the drivers being all on one of the drives and bios accesses that drive to boot up.

The Windows 7 operating system may not be compatible with the laptop systems drivers.

I cannot see the purpose of booting Windows 7 if you have Windows 10.

i7-8550U and its compatible core logic needs special hacking to run Windows 7

https://pressf1.pcworld.co.nz/showthread.php?147470-How-to-install-Windows-7-on-8th-Generation-Intel%AE-Core%99-i7-8550U-Processor-Solved

This is for advanced software people only.

Your bios is not user accessible if you need that accessed.



I know a lot about hardware and understand software issues, but not to the level you need it with that laptop.

Good luck and hope you don't mess up your laptop trying to F around with an operating system going obsolete.