Windows 10: Win 10 dualboot became singleboot after new install

I used to have a working Dual-boot system with Win 10 Pro for games and Win 10 Home for more serious work, each installed on its own NVMe-drive. Recently, I tested some beta-software for backup and restore, and it completely trashed my setup. Even a restore from the original program did not work. Thanks for that, Acronis.

At last, I did a full clean install of both OS's, but that had some hiccups, too. My UEFI-partitions had become polluted with several bootmanagers, and I found one instance of Ubuntu boot-repair, dating from more than a year ago. That was the partition on my NVMe-drive 1. Also, I found I had multiple UEFI-partitions on ONE drive; some on the last partitions.

On NVMe 2 I had installed Win 10 Pro, and that worked fine, eventhough it was booting from the UEFI-partition on NVMe1. For a short while, I had a dualboot system again. The next day, Win 10 Home failed to boot again, and the Recovery USB could not help. From what I could perceive, it would just install Windows all over again, and have me install all the programs anew.

So I decided to do a full clean install of WinHome again, from the Install USB. That did not seem to work, with the existing partitions NVMe 1 had TWO EFI partitions!!, so I scrapped the EFI and the Windows partitions. That finally seemed to do the trick, and since then, I have Win 10 Home running again. But the Bootmanager is now on NVMe 2, and it will boot straight into Win 10 Home on NVMe 1!!

In the past, I have dabbled with Linux Mint for a bit, and, there at least, was a command 'osprober' which could detect other OS's on my PC. Is there a command like that in or for Windows 10?

My Win 10 Pro install still seems to be complete; it somehow just does not report itself to Bootmanager.

But as far as I know all the essential files seem to be in place: in Windows\system32\boot I can see winload and winresume, both with *exe and *efi extensions. And in windows\boot I find bootmgr.efi, bootmgfw.efi and boot.stl.

Here is how my NVMe's look like in Disk Management:





I omitted 3 HDD's from this pic: they are non-bootable data-drives. I have used Windows since win 3.0; I have learned the hard way not to trust ANY system-drive with my data, so I keep all my data on separate HDD's.

I have created Recovery-USB's for BOTH Windows-installs, but it seems weird, that NVMe 1 does NOT have a recovery-partition. It might mean, that the Recovery-USB's will BOTH refer to the ONE partition on NVMe 2, and see nothing wrong there. That would make the Recovery-USB's completely useless.


Also, it should be noted, that Acronis Disk Director reports the EFI-partition as having 73.56 MB free space. Seems more accurate to me but confusing as hell, that Windows reports it as empty. And, to be clear: I installed build 2004 of Win 10 in both cases.


What can I do, to get my PC to dualboot again? I'd hate to have to install all my games again; that would take HOURS.

:)

 

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