Windows 10: Boot from one drive, and run Windows from another

So... I have an old HP Z600 workstation which is pretty awesome with dual Xeons and 48GB of ECC ram. My problem is that storage speed is a huge bottleneck. Due to its age the motherboard and BIOS only support SATA II (3 GB/s) which limits the speed of a SSD. I found a Marvel SATA III PCIe controller which works, but the BIOS will only allocate one lane, so it's still limited to about 4 GB/s. I have the latest BIOS and the BIOS is encrypted so none of the 3rd party BIOS hackers have had any success at updating it and adding new functionality.

So... I took a chance and bought a Samsung 970 NVMe M2 drive and a PCIe adapter knowing that I would probably not be able to boot from it, and I was correct. Once Windows starts and loads its own NVMe driver though, it recognizes the drive just fine. And WOW is it A LOT faster. (A minimum of 4 times faster, up to 10 times, depending on which benchmark you look at.)

So... The machine also includes a couple of WD HDDs which are plugged into the motherboard's SATA II ports. I was hoping to find a way to get the machine to start its boot from a HDD, load the bare minimum necessary to recognize the NVMe drive, then switch over and finish booting, and more importantly, run Windows from the NVMe drive.

Is this do-able? Could someone perhaps give me a summary of how it might be accomplished and steer me towards some documentation with the details?

:)

 

Windows 7 booting off wrong drive?!?!?

Please move if this is in the wrong place.

I have two hard drives, a 1.5TB drive, and a 160GB drive. Windows is installed on the 1.5TB drive, as are all my files and programs. The 160GB drive has a bunch of old files, and apparently the bootmgr and boot folder. Nothing else is on the 160GB drive, other than media files etc.

If I remove the 160GB drive from the machine, windows refuses to boot, plug it back in, it works fine. The setup with two hard drives I have now is temporary, as the 160GB drive will go into another machine.

My question is, can someone give me a step by step on how to make windows force to boot off the 1.5TB drive, ignoring the 160GB drive in the boot process completely?
I don't know how to do this in Windows 7, on XP I would just run the /fixmbr command and its related ones.

Any help would be appreciated.

Note: I would really really rather not have to wipe and reinstall, I know it can be done without one as I've had this issue with XP before.

 

Hard drive/ OS issue

a guy suggested :

• shutdown
• unhooked HDD
• restarted
• yay !!
• reconnected HDD
• restarted
• yay !!

also , try method 3
Fix: 'The Drive Where Windows is Installed is Locked'

 

Partitioning Hard Drives to run windows and linux

Hi All,

I have a tower with two hard drives. Until now I have been running windows on the first drive and using the second drive as backup. Now I reformatted the backup drive and installed Fedora Core. The installation was successful but how do I get the computer to boot from that drive? I'm in the BIOS and I see where the windows-platform drive is listed as my primary. I scrolled up to this line in the BIOS and tried pressing the spacebar, the return key, the left and right arrows but nothing will change the windows drive to the linux drive.

Can anyone tell me precisely and specifically how to make this change? Help is much appreciated. Thanks!