First post, by sndwv
I've been happily dual booting W7 and W10 on my (old) main PC for several years now, with a couple of SSDs shared between OSes, without any serious problems (*). But I've always had that nagging feeling that the way I have it set up might not be the smartest. So perhaps people more in the know could chime in and shine a light on a couple of things for me? The way I have it set up:
- Each OS is on it's own SSD.
- I choose which one to boot via my (pre-UEFI) motherboard's boot menu.
- Each OS has the other's SSD disabled, as disabling them in the BIOS did not hide them from either OS.
- Between them they share a separate SSD for games and data, as well as an external iSCSI drive.
*) I've never had any problems with data or file system errors, and launchers such as Steam, GOG or Origin (which do have their own instance installed on each OS drive) happily see, run and update the games on the shared drive. However:
- I have, for instance, had an OS crash (unrelated reasons), accidentally reboot into the other and have that Windows version running checkdisk on IT'S drive, in stead of the one that actually suffered the crash.
- I have also tried this same setup with a modern, UEFI BIOS system, and there I DID have issues with the OSses not always seeing each other's updates, to the iSCSI drive at least, leading to file system errors.
What I am wondering:
- Does this only work because W7 & W10 are in many ways nearly identical OSes?
- Does this only work on older hardware, is it UEFI (or perhaps something else?) that 'breaks' this on the newer hardware I tried?
- Is this a good idea to begin with, or might I have been balancing on a razor's edge with this setup?
PS: On my older hardware at least (ca. 15 years old) W7 is a much more pleasant experience than W10. Sure, W10 boots a bit faster, but in general I found FPS for most games to be a bit lower, and general file IO to be a lot (and I do mean a LOT) slower on W10.