Morning all! And it's nearly Spring. Time for another silly and probably obvious tech question from me (might start calling these "shower posers" since that's where most of them seem to pop into my head. Then you can all roll your eyes when you see the label). I think I know the answer to this one, but I'll ask anyway in case there is some arcane solution. If I have two separate Windows installs on two separate disks, but am running out of space on one and want to install some bits, can I switch between the two, either with one still running (assume not, since it's using the memory so guessing that data would all be lost) or by hibernating one before switching (since it will save memory to disk)? I suppose the follow-up question would then be what if they were on the same disk, would that make any difference (only out of interest, since this won't resolve the storage space issue)? And further - what if two different OS's? I do know virtual machines are a thing but the point is the storage space (plus there is limited GPU power in a VM). At the moment, I keep one of the drives switched off by means of a manual front panel button and swap them over when I need to do so by powering down and manually changing active drive before rebooting. Just wondered whether I have to go to all that trouble each time. At some point when I have more time I will consolidate everything so this is more out of interest as to the possibility, really. I'm thinking the answer is a big and obvious No to all the above, in which case has anyone had any success installing Game Pass games to an external drive?
To answer your initial question of whether swapping between the two is possible; yes it is. I won't go into the full details yet but it is fairly easy to do without having to change boot priorities or physically switch off HDDs. Is this first question somehow related to the second (Game Pass games)? I've never tried installing on to an external hard drive, but as far as I know there's no reason it shouldn't work. Do you get an error?
Hey noiz! I did wonder whether you'd be one of the responders - hope all is well! It is indeed related - a while back I found myself short of time to tidy up my Win 7 install but I did have a spare drive, so I just threw Win 10 on it with the idea being that it would only be temporary and I shouldn't go mad installing stuff. That of course went out the window over time as it became my main use drive, but it's not a huge one (500GB) so I'm getting to the space limit now. Some of the newer Game Pass titles are massive installs, so the only other way to do it on this disk would be to go about the hassle of un/reinstalling things. The reason the Win 7 drive is separate is because Win 10 runs a disk check every time I change between them - I did post about this a while ago and found a registry switch to turn off the disk check, but haven't got around to that yet (of course!). To try and get past the space issue, I did install some Game Pass titles to a Seagate external drive formatted as NTFS, but upon nearing download completion, an error appears and the download fails - I can't remember what it said, so I've just kicked one off now and I'll post the error screenshot once it appears. Checking online it looked as if people have had success with the same but the requirement looked to be the NTFS formatting, which I have, so I'm a bit stuck.
All is fine thanks, yourself? Yeah, we can get the multiboot to work correctly. It's basically a case of removing the boot info from the old Windows 7 SSD/HDD and letting the Windows 10 one manage both. Which also lets you choose which one you boot into each time you switch it on. Before we get into that, I'll await the screenshot!
Yeah, not bad cheers bud - making multiple rods for my back as usual, causing dramas I could do without (you'd think I had unlimited time the way I carry on)! At least it gives you and sandys and a few of the other guys a bit of purpose! I set off a few downloads yesterday - sorry for the delayed response but was trying to get a decent sample. As you'll see below, it seems game-dependent on whether the downloads go through, but not sure why this would be the case. Vampire Survivors installed fine to C: and is playable so that was my control; Superliminal installed fine to E: and was playable; Darktide got to the end of the progress bar, then showed up this morning as having an update due, but upon kicking that off it's now giving the below error (even though I haven't changed the folder as it suggests): But checking the folder in E: shows it pulled down a whole raft of stuff and the notifications in the Xbox App suggest the initial download worked: Having said all that, these are different errors to those I was getting before and the app has undergone some updates (as has Edge and Cloud Gaming, since you can no longer use a 360 pad to play in the cloud yet you can use one once something is installed) so maybe something has been fixed, or maybe it's just the Darktide download this time...?? I'm going to kick off Atomic Heart as that's a sizeable title and a AAA effort, no idea if smaller size/indie-ish titles have different requirements that allow them to install and run. However, back to the original double boot/hotswap question, would be good to hear your thoughts as this would save me quite some hassle. I did come up with a couple of further questions yesterday though (and incidentally, I had to update Win 10 yesterday morning, which so far has resulted in two new WHEA BSODs where I haven't seen any for quite a while): is whatever we're going to do to the Win 7 disk reversible if needed? or would I have to always have a Win 10 disk in the same machine? or would it even have to always be THIS Win 10 disk in the machine? Thanks as always for your help (and patience!), bud
It's possible it's just Darktide and the updates have fixed the previous issue. I know there was a problem at one point with games that required admin elevation which gave the sort of errors you were having, but I think that was fixed. what does it do if you delete the folder and try again? Are all your drivers up to date as that's usually the cause of WHEA related stuff. For the dual boot questions: Yeah, completely reversible and it would always need to be that specific Windows 10 disk. If you changed it, or flattened it and reinstalled, you'd have to repeat part of the process. Here's the instructions for the initial setup (all in admin command prompt/terminal). Make sure you don't have secure boot or Bitlocker enabled. You'll also need both disks powered on with the Windows 10 one set as first in UEFI. Make a note of the drive letter of the Windows 7 installation when you're in Windows 10 (I'll call it x). Code: bcdboot x:\windows /d /addlast bcdedit /timeout 10 There are a couple more bits I would normally do, such as deleting the boot partition from the Windows 7 disk but given you may want to undo it or change, we'll leave that for now. Every time you boot from then on you'll be given a menu to choose between the two with the timeout being 10 seconds (second command above, choose whatever value you want or leave it out entirely as the default is 30 seconds). Once the timeout is reached, it will boot into Windows 10 automatically.
Hey noiz, so sorry for delayed response - work got busy and I ended up trying to install and run different titles in the evening, to try and make sense of the Game Pass issue. I found that it seems to be title-dependent: Atomic Heart and Scorn (both installed to E both opened the launcher window but then didn't run; Darktide (after deleting the folder and going again, per your suggestion ) gave me this interesting message: So I turned every single setting down to minimum and it did the same as the others - launcher window opens, says "Launching Game" but then just disappears. Bizarrely (and probably unconnected-ly) Windows Update also just now offered me an upgrade to W11 22H2, even though up until a few weeks ago it was telling me my machine did not meet the requirements, so something must have changed there as well. However, Vampires (on C and Superliminal (on E both run fine, so I don't know what the limitation is other than possibly size of install if on E:? I've updated the Nvidia drivers to avoid the WHEA errors as that looks like the only thing that's obviously outdated (and I only know that via the system tray notification), but why would outdated drivers cause BSODs if the hardware hasn't changed? How would the system know they're outdated if it was running fine beforehand? I'm going to run a backup before I attempt the above boot re-ordering, just in case I mess something up, but will this allow me to hot-swap between the installations or is it just a "select at startup and run with your choice" type affair? EDIT: Looks like my drive letter colons came out as smileys. That's okay, I'll leave them in.
@noizdaemon666 - so here is a thing...I've un/reinstalled Atomic Heart to the C : and it works fine (is also very amazing, graphically) so is this a size thing vs external drive? Maybe things don't load quick off the USB and just crash? Whaddya reckon about whether I can hot-swap between Win installs? I've just filled my entire drive up testing whether AH would work! Dear me...
I don't think it's size related, I would imagine it's speed or something else to do with the external hard drive. The random W11 upgrade has appeared for other people, but I've not looked into it as I don't own anything which isn't supported anymore! I'd advise against attempting it for now at any rate. The boot related stuff won't let you hot-swap, it is just a choice on boot unfortunately. The only way to hot-swap would be to run both operating systems in VMs which really wouldn't help in this case haha. My personal recommendation at this point would be to flatten it all and install a fresh copy of Windows 10, but I'm a masochist who likes starting from scratch
