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Trying to boot Windows 7 or Windows 8 from separate laptop drives
My Dell laptop currently contains three hard drives, the main SSD drive containing Windows 7 Ultimate and nearly all application installations. Another drive is a mini-SSD that serves strictly as a fast-access data drive. The other large capacity (conventional drive) is used as the main data drive.
I decided to try Windows 8, but didn't want to "go all in" and upgrade the existing Windows 7 installation. So, I replaced the second hard drive with another of the same type and size, cloned my existing Windows 7 drive, booted the computer from the new #2 drive, and upgraded that Windows 7 installation, all without any problem at all. I can now do a selective boot from either drive and load the OS of my choice. Unfortunately, there is one annoying problem that I'm not sure what to do about.
Regardless of the OS that gets booted, during the loading process, I get messages indicating that each of the drives in the system "need to be checked for consistency". Regardless of whether or not I allow this disk check to run, both OSes will boot and everything "appears" to work fine. However, I'm afraid that things might be going on in the background somewhere that *could* render either one or both drives un-bootable at some point which could be a major problem for me, particularly if it was the original Windows 7 SSD installation.
Does anyone know why the OSes want to do this "consistency check" (which can take a long time on the large conventional drive), and/or if there's a way to prevent them? And, is there any real likelihood that either one of the OSes would do something to the other OS drive that might compromise its ability to boot? It wouldn't be my first choice, but I'd even be willing to "hide" each of the OS drives from each other if that was the only way to avoid potential problems down the road; that is, if I knew how to do such "hiding".
Another idea I had was to try to utilize the "Windows To Go" feature available with the Enterprise version of Windows 8. Apparently it's possible to install and boot Windows 8 on a flash drive and it won't interfere with any existing OS. Would it not be possible to simply use the second hard drive for the installation, as opposed to a flash drive?
Any thoughts, ideas or suggestions will be greatly appreciated!