a bit of a long title but hopefully it gives you the idea.
at the moment i use one disk for normal stuff and one for audio..both running windows 8.1 64-bit but looking to change to windows 10 soon.
i realise it is a small thing on its own and may be diminishing returns, but going back and forth can add up...i wonder, is there a way to switch very quickly, maybe even instantly, between the two operating systems (each on the different physical disk)..i have my computer configured for UEFI boot which does help but it can't do ultra-fast boot (not sure what the lowest end graphics card i would need for that, is). i also have an external USB 3 drive upon which the system seems to hang as it spins up between boots.
If it IS possible, anyone got any pointers or tips for i might do this please?

 

Not exactly sure this will help but.. I actually create 2 partitions on my hdd in one i have win7 and the other win 10.. so when i boot, i can choose which one to boot into...

 

That's too slow for him, he wants to switch them like tabs probably (alt+tab style)

 

run one as a virtual machine inside the other

 

Yeah, was thinking the same, but than again, it's not exact same thing as running it fully, latency and all that stuff, but for some basic tasks, awesome

 

I'm using two separate installed HDDs (1 TB Samsung + 500 GB Seagate), but always one at time is enabled from BIOS Setup (other is disabled). Ny this way, one system disk never "see" the other disk.

 

How fast can you switch from one to another?

 

I don't quite understand why you need to switch between two Windows operating systems, however here's my take: why don't you make different users on the same OS? A user in which you configure your system for day-to-day use and another one focused on music production (taskbar shortcuts etc)?

 

You can't truly switch unless you have two complete computers. Doesn't matter if they are on different drives, they need their own CPU, RAM, motherboard, GPU, etc.

As mates have stated the closest thing is having one of them as a VM. But this means shared resources and performance.

 

evidently, he can't ...(i'm joking mozart)

 

Sure it's not user friendly, because I must enter in BIOS Setup (during system restart) in order to switch HDDs!

 

thanks for your replies..it actually stems from another thread on the board today...about whether or not you should you setup DAW with internet...i have two physically different drives - one which i call normal is for the internet stuff and the audio os is for DAW and its not connected, or at least selectibly connected. i'd done this for a few years and assumed it was a good way of organising things..i'd like to keep it this way and wondered if there was any way of speeding up the process of shutting down, rebooting into each OS for instance if i upload a track to a site on the internet, i grab the stems, shut down and reboot (maybe forgetting to have taken note of some of the track details..bpm etc) then have to reboot into the internet connected OS again to get these details and reboot again, then reboot again to work on the track in my DAW then reboot to upload the track to the site. you could call this a first (or maybe second) world problem but there seems to be a strange drought of information on what i thought was quite a common setup for audio-ists.

note: i use the windows 8.1 boot menu in transit booting when it asks choose another operating system..hold down shift key while selecting restart in the start menu...this has sped things up since i don't have to go through the OS selection screen twice.

 

mozart, have you installed a special OS selection screen to open following the bios loading?...i guess this is the point that each time we must go through the BIOS if using OS's on separate disks.