Did you have a problem with encrypted Windows 11 on your second hard drive? It all went wrong right?
Did you have a problem with encrypted Windows 11 on your second hard drive? It all went wrong right?
I am confused about what is happening here. My goal is to run two separate Windows 11 computers on one laptop. One will be encrypted, and the other will be normal. I thought setting up a dual boot would stop them from talking to each other (but that was wrong!). Here is how I did it: I made a backup image of my old drive (let's call this Drive A) and disconnected it. Then I plugged in a 2TB hard drive that uses an M.2 slot (Drive B). After copying the backup onto Drive B, I booted into Drive B and encrypted the system partition using VeraCrypt. Everything worked fine until I put Drive A back on the motherboard. Then everything went <censored> . I can boot to Drive A easily, but when I change my BIOS settings to start from Drive B, it asks for a password like it should. But if I enter that password, it actually boots from Drive A!
I had set up the dual-boot option in VeraCrypt earlier, so now I am wondering if that was the right choice. I have tried changing every single BIOS setting I can think of, but nothing works. Even when I completely disabled Drive A from the boot menu, nothing helped. It is really hard for me to physically unscrew my M.2 SSD every time I want to switch drives because that would involve losing all my data. Also, I don't want to have to reinstall Windows from scratch every single day, but I am afraid that might be necessary. I feel like if I had been smarter, I could just edit the EFI system partitions and solve this whole mess without changing anything physically!
Locking down access by adding more encryption feels too much trouble. Simply removing drive letters on a different OS disk will make that part of the system unreachable.
Encrypting only the system disk is probably the main issue. On my own, I'd just use BitLocker to protect drive B because Windows works well with that built-in protection feature.