Yes, you can create a new local user account and have it boot up, or sign in from another hard drive.
Yes, you can create a new local user account and have it boot up, or sign in from another hard drive.
I'm on Windows 11 and I'm the Admin account. Ok so here's the thing: I have an SSD and an HDD . 1TB each . My main boot drive is on my SSD and the HDD as second internal storage drive. So, my family wants to use my PC for work purposes and my brother wants it to play games and other software. So, when I set up their local accounts, I found out they too will boot up in my SSD and can access my personal data, games and videos including my steam account (my libraries they can see it too) . I don't want this. This is making me want to separate their local accounts from mine and allocate them in the HDD drive that was purchased recently, if that is possible. So, I'm asking if they can be moved to or boot up in the HDD drive when they sign-in to their accounts. Not them booting up in my SSD and then accessing my personal games and data. Thus, making my local drive private to them and letting them do whatever the hell they want in HDD like installing any apps they want and do office work in it. But I think apps like Edge, Words, Excel or PDF and any other work apps in my SSD can be shared and accessed by them. It's just the gaming apps, steam, private pics and other media which I would not allow them to. In a sense, does selective privacy works too? Extra: If I were to partition the HDD into 2 drives, can I still allocate the other users to it? If that is possible. P.S I know about Dual Drives boot, but I can't use the same windows product key when I do that. But, if the problem above can't be solved, then might as well do dual drives.
When Windows is installed on an SSD, it will start from there. You can't boot from another drive without a different installation on the HDD. The issue seems more about access rights. You'd need to ensure other users have separate accounts without admin privileges. Then assign permissions to files you want them to avoid, allowing only you to read or write to them.
The core issue is whether you can allow other local accounts to access your drives without signing in, so they can use their own apps or data on the HDD while keeping your SSD free from their files. You want them to log in directly to your SSD and not have their applications installed there.
By default, Windows places installed items in "C:\Program Files." Altering this path isn't officially supported and is even harder on a per-user basis. Modifying it could stop others from installing software or block writes to the SSD, though you'd need to experiment until your setup runs smoothly.