Question About Encrypted Windows 11 on 2nd Drive, Complete Failure?
Question About Encrypted Windows 11 on 2nd Drive, Complete Failure?
I'm not sure about the situation here. My aim is to run two separate Windows 11 systems on one machine—one encrypted and the other unencrypted—which I thought would prevent them from interfering with each other (that was a mistake!).
What I did:
I made a macrium backup of my original system drive (let's call it drive A)
I removed drive A from its M.2 slot
I connected a 2TB 3.5" HDD (call it drive B)
I transferred the macrium image from drive A onto drive B
I booted into drive B and encrypted its partition with Veracrypt
I started drive B and everything functions properly
However, when I reconnected drive A to the motherboard, things changed—something went wrong. I can boot into drive A without issues, but when I switch BIOS settings to boot from drive B, it prompts for my Veracrypt password as expected, yet I enter it and it boots from drive A!
I selected the dual-boot option during setup of the Veracrypt volume, but now I'm questioning whether that was the right decision. I've tried adjusting every BIOS setting I can think of, but nothing works (even disabling drive A from the boot menu didn't help).
I don’t want to physically remove my M.2 SSD each time I need to switch to drive B. I also don’t want to reinstall Windows from scratch, but I’m worried I might have to. I feel like if I were more careful, I could just edit the EFI system partitions and fix this problem.
Encryption is only to restrict access, which feels too much.
Just delete the drive letters for the other OS partition and it becomes unreachable.
I need to encrypt this for several reasons. Ultimately, the drive isn't starting.