Question Encrypted Windows 11 on 2nd drive, complete failure ?

[darkhelmet77]

I'm not sure what's going on here. My goal is to have two isolated Windows 11 systems on one machine. One is encrypted and the other is normal, which I thought would keep them from recognizing and interfering with each other (I was wrong!)

here's what I did:

1. created macrium backup image of my original system drive (let's call it drive A)
2. disconnected drive A from m.2 slot
3. connected 2TB 3.5" hdd (let's call it drive B)
4. copied the macrium image of drive A onto drive B
5. booted to drive B and encrypted the system partition with veracrypt
6. booted up newly encrypted drive B, everything works as it should

however, when I reconnected drive A to the motherboard, everything went to <censored>. I can boot to drive A just fine, but when I change bios settings to boot to drive B.... it asks me for my veracrypt password like it should, but then then I enter my password and it boots from Drive A!

I I chose the dual boot option when setting up the veracrypt volume, but now I'm starting to wonder if that was the right choice. I have messed with every bios option I can think of but nothing works (I even tried completely disabling drive A from the boot menu).

There's no way I'm going to physically unscrew my M.2 SSD every single time I want to boot to drive B. I also really don't want to have to reinstall windows from scratch, but I'm afraid I might have to. I feel like if I was smarter I could just edit the EFI system partitions and solve this whole thing

 

[SkyNetRising]

Encryption just to limit access seems excessive.
Just remove drive letters for other OS partition and it becomes inaccessible.

 

[darkhelmet77]

I want it encrypted for a bunch of reasons. Anyway the drive won't boot regardless

 

[dwd999]

1. booted to drive B and encrypted the system partition with veracrypt

Encrypting just the system partition may be the primary problem. Personally I would have just encrypted the entire drive B with Bitlocker since windows gets along with its own encryption software better.