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I have 2 physical drives drive 1 and drive 2. My drive 1 already has a Windows 8 installed, and I want to insall a Windows 7 on my drive 2
I first tried to boot from a USB stick and tried to install windows 7 on the drive 2. It installed windows successfully, however it seems to have added a boot entry to my drive 1 (this is dual boot right ?). However this is not what I wanted to achieve. If from the BIOS, I boot into drive 2, it says the media is not bootable.
I wanted to have totally independent installation. Ie. booting from the bios on drive 2 should run the new Windows I just installed (withouteven suggesting to switch to Windows 8 on drive 1). (Drive 1 is old and I want to do something else with it anyway)
One obvious solution is to unplug every Drive but drive 2 so that Windows is forced to install boot info on drive 2. But is there another way which does not require to manually unplug the other drives ? Did I miss something during the Windows installation ? Can I actually control where the boot is going to be placed with the classic bootable Windows ISO ?
Is this Windows-version specific ? I am installing Windows 7 because I have a win7 key/ISO and I know I can run the free Win10 upgrade from there.
EDIT (why would I possibly want that ?) :
- Drive1 is too small (128GB SSD), while drive2 is bigger (250GB SSD) and I am going to gift drive1 to someone else (so remove it from my comp).
- Drive1 is showing signs of failure, and I am expecting drive1 to completely fail sometime.
Alright, but @NorPhi's answer & comment seem to say that the loader and/or manager are installed on a specific "reserved for system" partition before the Windows partition. If this partition has not been created (and I install Windows instead on the full available disk space), then I can no longer install the missing boot loader/manager on the drive without having to destroy my windows partition? – Cyril Duchon-Doris – 2015-09-02T11:49:20.110
1a normal windows installation always creates this partition. It has 100-300mb and this can only prevented via basically an exploit during the installation so if you did not explicetly search for a way to do this you have this partition (it can be seen in disk management) the reason for this partition is if you encrypt your drive with bitlocker then at least the boot manager has to be unencrypted all the time so it is still readable. Even if you manage to get rid of it (don't..) you can create partitions after the windows installation by removing some space from the win partition. – Syberdoor – 2015-09-02T13:14:21.550