Dual Boot and Boot Order on Acer TC-885-UA92

DC22

Hello,

Thank you for your time. I just installed a second SSD (Samsung 860 EVO) internally on my TC-885-UA92. It shows up in BIOS. However, on the Boot Menu neither of the SSD's (WD NVMe that it came with nor the Samsung SATA) are displayed to choose from. Only Window Boot Manager is displayed, then Optical Drive, etc.

How do I change between SSD's for testing and dual booting? 

Thank you.

billsey

The system has a UEFI boot. You want the EFI partition to be on the NVMe drive, since that drive is up to twice as fast as the SATA drive (pretty close to the same speed if 2 lanes, double speed if 4 lanes). You can put the OS on either drive, but again the NVMe should be faster. Are you planning on booting a second OS on the SATA drive?

DC22

Thanks Billsey. Yes I was thinking of putting a second OS on the Samsung Sata SSD.

ttttt

@DC22
It seemed to me that you have not installed the OS to these SSDs. You may want to use cloning software or the Win 10 Create System Image ad restore the image to the new SSDs so that it will appear under Bootmenu.

Are you trying to dual boot  from one HDD/SSD or just individual boot from separate HDD/SSD? I think you want to boot individually.

DC22

Thanks ttttt! 
I have a System Image copy on the new Samsung SSD. I actually had to restore my system this morning from that image because I attempted to rollback a change I made last night with a Restore Point and it froze in the Registry restoration - at least I think it did because it had taken 3 hours and was still spinning. I don't have anything on here except a virtual machine as it's a new system.

When I went into WinRE there were no restore points available as the C: drive had been corrupted in that process. I was able to restore from the Samsung and run Chkdsk and SFC to make sure everything was good again.

As far are booting goes I've never had any issues selecting the boot order or booting from USB until I got this ACER. I know how to clone drives etc. but I've only used PC's that my school provided and they are a lot older than this. Before this I only had a Mac.

To answer your question I'd like to configure both Dual Boot and individual boot from the Samsung SSD.

I appreciate everyone's time and help.

ttttt

@DC22
  
You seemed to have experience in doing disk cloning and multi disk booting.

Have you tried to set the BIOS back to "Optimized Default" after restoring the system image?

DC22

No I have not. I will look that up. Thank you. Do you know why in this BIOS it doesn't list the devices on the Boot Menu?

It lists something like "Boot Manager" "Peripheral Device" "Optical Drive" "Removeable Device."

I put "Removeable Device" and "Optical Drive" on top of the list and it wouldn't boot to either of them.

ttttt

@DC22
In the BIOS Boot Option tab and under "Boot Priority Order", the 1st Boot Device should be "Windows Boot Manager" if you want to boot Windows as 1st priority.
Also, the "Hard Disk Drive Priority" should be selected to the drive you have the Windows on it and want to boot first.

Since the Removable Device and Optical Drive are not bootable or not connected, those devices will not appear in the Bootmenu.
Should not be put on top of the list.

Anyway, I think setting it to "Optimized Default" is important. Don't forget to set "Secure Boot" to off or disable in the BIOS.

billsey

Boot Manager is the EFI table of OS images. Those are the ones authorized to boot in Secure Boot mode. They all should appear in the F12 boot menu normally (and typically there is only one or two). When you disable Secure boot all EFI environments will show up in F12, including things like external flash drives that are GPT with a EFI boot environment. You can pretty much ignore the boot priority order in the BIOS unless you have two Secure Boot options, like Windows and Linux.

DC22

Got it. You guys are super helpful thank you!!

billsey

Glad we could help.