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Hands-On Tech 258: Dual-Booting Windows 10 & Windows 11
00:14:16
Dual-Booting Windows OS's
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Coming up on Hands On Tech, let's take a look at something rather nerdy. Dual booting windows 10 and windows 11. Stay tuned. This is twit. Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech. I am Micah Sargent and it is my duty, my joy and my job to take your tech questions and answer them. So by the way, if you have tech questions, get in touch. Hotwit TV is how you get in touch with me to answer. Well, to take a look at today's question, let's see who wrote in. David has written in and has an interesting question that I think we're going to have to get a little nerdy with. David writes. Hi Micah. Hi David. I have a new HP desktop that came with Windows 11 Home. I put in a separate SSD to install Windows 10 to make a dual boot system. It goes through the normal setup, but when it restarts it, it goes to Recovery mode. Windows 11 boots fine and I can choose which one to boot to. I know the Windows 10 USB is okay because I tried it on another PC and it worked fine as a dual boot with Windows 11 and 10. I even tried System File Checker and found nothing wrong. I know about the GPT and MBR boot system as the HP system is GPT, as is the new drive because it lets me install the setup files. It just crashes on the first reboot. Any help would be welcome. So David, little complicated lot going on here. So I looked into people hanging on to Windows 10 and people attempting to do the same thing as you and what was possibly at the root of this. And it's confusing, but it seems to be it is almost certainly related to how your specific HP Windows PC handles Secure Boot and TPM in combination with Secure Boot, TPM and Windows 10. Now, newer HP desktops that ship with Windows 11 have Secure Boot enabled and TPM 2.0, which is of course active by default. Windows 10 can work with these features, but the installation process sometimes does mess up on this first reboot because of how the firmware is actually handing off to the new os. So what does that mean? It means that there's a process that kind of gets things rolling before we roll into going to Windows 11 and booting from there. Now that's one issue, but there's also a chance that the HP BIOS is messing with the boot order. And so some HP systems will kind of reset or prioritize the Windows Boot Manager entry that's tied to the drive that that has the Windows installation that is the default okay or the original installation. So what does that mean? It means that it like the HP system will go. I don't really care what you're asking me to do. I know who I am and who I am as a Windows 11 machine on the drive that was in that came with me. And so it's prioritizing that and not paying attention to the changes that you have made on top of it. So it can cause the Windows 10 setup to kind of lose its place after that first reboot. So what do we do? How do we fix this? Well, here are some things that different people did. Check your BIOS settings first. Now I believe for your machine, you restart it and then you tap F10 upon reboots to get into the HP. Well, on reboot to get into the HP BIOS setup, then we're going to look at, going to look for some different things here. First look for secure boot. If you find secure boots, try disabling it temporarily just during the installation of Windows 10. Okay, you're not going to keep it that way, but during the setup and installation of Windows 10, try it, then re enable it afterward. Once you've got everything working, it's likely that this is all you're going to need to do. And from that point on you'll be able to boot and get Windows 10 running. And then you can go from there. Turn this back on. Then let's talk about boot order. Make sure that the SSD that you're installing Windows 10 on is actually listed and prioritized properly. Now there are are some HPA BIOS versions that have both a UEFI boot order and an OS boot manager. So you need to make sure that it shows up in both of these places and shows up in the place where it's supposed to be. There's also in the BIOS settings something called legacy support. Turn this off. You want to stay in UEFI mode because both drives are GPT. So turning on that Legacy or CSM mode is just going to cause more problems. You want to just kind of. We're trying to eliminate variables here, right? So let's get rid of the legacy support issue playing at it. Now, once you've done this, another thing that you can try is you can try disconnecting the Windows 11 drive while you're doing the Windows 10 install. Again, don't keep it this way, but at the initial you can try this. It's a brute force method, but it does work. You unplug or Disable in the BIOS, the Windows 11 SSD install Windows 10 on the second SSD is the only drive in the system system. Let it do the full setup, including that first reboot without the other drive present. And then once it's fully installed and you're at the desktop, you can shut down. You then reconnect the Windows 11 drive and then use the BIOS boot menu, which is to access this F9 on most HP machines to choose which OS to boot. Now, if you're going, I don't like this idea, I don't want to disconnect my Windows 11 drive. Well, here's what you can do. If you want both drives to be connected during the installation. When Windows 10 installer finishes copying files and says it's going to restart, don't let it reboot automatically. When the system restarts, then hit F9 F9 real quick, which will bring up that boot menu, I believe on your HP system and then select the new ssd. It could just be again that Windows or that the BIOS is going, I'm going to do this and then it is, or you need to tell it, no, I don't want you to do this. I want you to go the other way.
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- [08:06]
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melissa.com TWIT once you've done all of this, your troubleshooting steps to get it installed. Let's say now you've got it installed. Windows 10 is installed. It's all working. Yeah, Burke, I agree with you. Burke in the chat says having a hard drive for each OS is ideal, but it can get really messy. And in your case it has. But let's talk about what we need to do afterwards. So again, you got Windows 10 installed and what you're probably finding is that the system is just going to boot to one OS or the other without giving you a choice. If you are having that issue, there's an app, it's called Easy bcd. It's free for personal use, and then you can set it up to give you a proper dual boot menu, meaning that you can then choose how to boot. You can also use the BCD Edit command if you are in the command proper command prompt as an admin. Doing so will let you add boot entries. But if all of these words that I'm using are sounding like whoa to you, Easy BCD is going to make it a lot more user friendly, a lot easier to get things set up, a lot easier to understand what you're doing. That said, there's also another option which is just relying on that F9 boot menu. So every time you go to boot it is, you know, giving you the way to by hitting F9. The ability to choose it is the cleanest approach because the boot managers are existent on both drives and that means that you're not worried about all this other stuff kind of getting in the way. But it does require you to then always be there to go, oh, F9, F9. And I don't think that's that ideal. So easy BCD, I think, is the choice for you.
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Now,
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I would be remiss if I did not mention something very important for you to understand, which is that. Well, I'll end. I'll. I'll tell you that in just a moment. All right, so we have Wayne writing in, or not Wayne, excuse me. We have David writing in, talking about dual booting. We've kind of gone through the process of what's required to dual boot Windows 10 and Windows 11. Have the choice between the two. What issues were at. Involved with, with the installation. But with that out of the way, the thing that I want to remind you is that Microsoft did end Support for Windows 10. That was in October of 2025. So, you know, we're coming up on at least a year. This year will be a year of Windows 10 official support coming to a close. And so with that, you're not getting security updates, David. It's not happening unless you are paying for extended security updates. So if you're dual booting Windows 10 for a specific application or if there's a compatibility layer that you need, just know that when you're doing this, you are potentially putting yourself and your data at risk, particularly if you're browsing the web. So if this is just about having a specific app and that's why you need Windows Windows 10, then it might be worth checking out if that app has any updates or compatibility mode that would make it possible to run on Windows 11. If this is just because you don't want to use Windows 11 because it's annoying or whatever, be mindful of the fact that you are putting yourself at risk due to Microsoft no longer providing to most users of the Windows 10 of the Windows 10 operating system not providing security updates anymore. And even with the extended security updates, those aren't going to last forever. So it may be worth moving along if you can. If you can't, then I hope, David, that this answered your question. And as I always say, I would love to hear from you. Let me know if these solutions worked for you. You can reach us Hotwit TV with your update. But that, folks, is our very nerdy look at dual booting Windows 10 and Windows 11 on a machine that has two different S SDS with the operating systems installed. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Hands On Tech. I, Micah Sargent will be back next week with another episode. Bye. Bye.