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I have two laptops. One I use mostly for work stuff. Even though I use it for work, it's my own personal laptop and not corporate owned. The other laptop I use for personal activities. They both have Windows 10 Pro on them. The work laptop died. Only the power LED lights up and nothing else happens when I turn it on (I suspect the bios is bricked).

I removed the SSD from the work laptop and placed it into an empty slot in my personal laptop. The BIOS recognizes both SSDs but it only boots from the original personal SSD. From my personal Windows 10, I can access my work files from the work SSD but I obviously can't run any of the installed programs. I don't really feel like installing the work apps from scratch on my personal SSD.

What I want is to dual boot from either SSDs: enter image description here

However, the PC just boots into the personal SSD automatically. How do I tell windows boot manager that the second SSD has a valid Windows 10 OS on it and add it to the boot list?

Before anyone downvotes and/or closes the question for being a duplicate, this is the only similar question I found. Even though I'm not really sure what that post is asking, I'm pretty sure it's not how to add a second SSD to windows boot manager.

Also, I can specify the boot priority in BIOS and switch between the two hard drives, and this works just fine, but, again, that's not what I'm asking. My goal is to get something like in the image above.

user1969903
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  • Seems like a duplicate : https://superuser.com/questions/511582/how-to-use-bcdedit-to-dual-boot-windows-installations – harrymc Apr 02 '22 at 09:44
  • How on earth did you find that? All I get is "dual boot ubuntu this" and "dual boot grub that". Even so, it's not technically a duplicate. The user is asking specifically about bcdedit. My question might be useful if there are other ways to do it apart from using bcdedit, which I didn't even know existed until your comment. – user1969903 Apr 02 '22 at 13:11
  • @user1969903 - The answer to your question is to use BCDEdit. However, it’s very likely unless the hardware was extremely similar, you will be able to boot off the HDD from the other machine. Windows also will not be activated. What part of the process of editing your BCD are you stuck on exactly? You can also avoid modifying your BCD by changing the boot order of your disks. – Ramhound Apr 02 '22 at 14:55
  • I'm not stuck on anything, I don't know what BCD is. Regarding the boot order, as I said in the question, I can do that but I am tired of entering the bios every time I want to change boot drive. – user1969903 Apr 02 '22 at 16:02
  • Have a good read of the linked post and study the answers, and especially [this one](https://superuser.com/a/562202/8672). Don't start without understanding what BCDEdit does. If this works for you, then this post is truly a duplicate. – harrymc Apr 02 '22 at 17:43
  • @user1969903 BCD is an acronym for "Boot Configuration Data". The BCD is a firmware-independent database file which *drumroll* has boot-time configuration data for Windows. – Anaksunaman Apr 02 '22 at 18:09
  • Does this answer your question? [How to use BCDEdit to dual boot Windows installations?](https://superuser.com/questions/511582/how-to-use-bcdedit-to-dual-boot-windows-installations) – music2myear Apr 03 '22 at 04:07
  • Not really. I couldn't get it working with bcdedit. Tried copying and modifying entries, creating new ones from scratch.. nothing worked. It either rebooted the computer, started the startup repair (which failed to repair the startup) or it just booted to a black screen. – user1969903 Apr 06 '22 at 06:12
  • What I ended up doing was to install a third sacrificial windows on a separate partition on the new SSD. This way, the windows installer added the boot entry correctly. After that, I used Clonezilla to clone the original work windows partition over the newly installed sacrificial one. After a reboot, lo and behold, my system displayed two boot entries and I could boot into both the personal windows install as well as the work one. Still, there has to be a better way. – user1969903 Apr 06 '22 at 06:17

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