Boot Windows on another drive via editing BCD?

Discussion in 'Windows 10' started by nomad5739, May 4, 2021.

  1. nomad5739

    nomad5739 MDL Novice

    Mar 31, 2011
    5
    0
    0
    Back story:
    May of last year I modded the UEFI for my Asus Sabertooth x79 to add NVME boot support.

    However, over the course of the year I've had this weird crash issue that happens intermittently where the screen goes black.

    If I was watching a YouTube the audio will continue to play as normal or if I was in a conference call the audio would continue work for a period of time but I could not connect to the machine via RDP to try to see what was going on.

    To troubleshoot the issue I cloned my NVME drive back onto a SATA SSD using DD from a Linux live CD and reverted the mod.

    To my surprise when I booted my computer up it booted from the NVME drive instead of the SATA SSD!

    I'm thinking that was possible because the drive was cloned and the disk signatures are the same.

    Also, the SATA SSD shows up as offline in Windows because the signatures are the same preventing it from being used.


    Thread:
    I would like to keep using the NVME drive but random system crashes are annoying so I'm wondering if this "chain loading" (BIOS/UEFI loads Windows Boot Loader from SATA SSD which loads Windows from NVME drive) can be leveraged.

    I still don't know if the crashing issue has gone away. It's only been a day so this may be a fruitless endeavor.
     
  2. nomad5739

    nomad5739 MDL Novice

    Mar 31, 2011
    5
    0
    0
    #3 nomad5739, May 4, 2021
    Last edited: May 4, 2021
    (OP)
    Thanks for the info. I'll do some reading and try to figure out what bcdboot parameters are needed after I've made a backup. Would it be "easier" with another bootloader like Clover, GRUB2, rEFInd, Etc.?
     
  3. Tito

    Tito Super Mod / Adviser
    Staff Member

    Nov 30, 2009
    18,681
    18,589
    340
    @nomad5739

    On another note, you can easily assign a new unique ID to the SATA SSD using diskpart:
    Code:
    diskpart
    list disk
    select disk X
    uniqueid disk ID=[put a random GUID here]
    online disk
    
     
  4. verndog

    verndog MDL Member

    May 3, 2010
    211
    93
    10
    Also from your live linux disk, you can issue:
    Code:
    sudo tune2fs -U random /dev/SSDnumber