Question Dual booting in a laptop with widows installed on both drives

[shahab123]

I have installed an SSD in place of the old HDD in an old Dell core i3 laptop, and my old HDD in place of the DVD using a caddy, leaving the old Windows 8.1 partition as is. I then clean installed windows 10 in the SSD, and the system works fine. now my question is. Is there any way to boot from the old windows on HDD as well as the new windows 10 in a dual boot fashion?

I have installed an SSD in place of old HDD, and the old HDD in place of the DVD using a caddy in an old Dell core i3 laptop, leaving the old Windows 8.1 partition as is. I have clean installed windows 10 in the SSD, and the system works fine. now my question is. Is there any way to boot from the old windows on HDD as well as the new windows 10 in a dual boot fashion?

 

[karenjoly]

I'd be interested to know whether the ssd boots when the hdd is unattached ?
Re dual booting, no problemo.There may be a key that brings up a boot menu after POST that allows you to chose the boot drive rather than rely on the default choice set up in the bios.

 

[popatim]

karenjoy is correct on both counts.
Remove the HDD and boot the laptop. You may need to run startup repair on the SSD a few times to fix the BCD or use a program like easyBCD.

 

[shahab123]

I'd be interested to know whether the ssd boots when the hdd is unattached ?
Re dual booting, no problemo.There may be a key that brings up a boot menu after POST that allows you to chose the boot drive rather than rely on the default choice set up in the bios.

i selected the HDD from the boot option menu (pressing F2 on bootup) and was able to boot from the older windows on the HDD which worked fine, but after restart the new windows 10 on SSD had to do a 'repair' before booting, This method does work but I would be afraid to do it again lest I damage the boot manager or something causing trouble. I am looking for a safer way to dual boot, something like booting from windows and Linux.