Making A Dual Boot System Using UEFI As The Boot Manager

I’ve just bought a new PC to replace an ageing Dell Precision 490. On my old Dell I had two large SSDs (MBR formatted) each containing one Windows 10 system and one Windows 11 system, so 4 bootable systems in all and I could clone from one to the other easily and quickly using Paragon Drive Copy simply by copying the windows partition. I used EasyBCD to choose which system to boot using the EasyBCD menu, I could boot any of the 4 windows systems at will. This gave me a good operating system backup facility and some protection against disk failures.

I would like to do the same sort of thing on my new PC but ideally using the UEFI boot manager instead of EasyBCD. Currently I have Windows 11 Pro installed on one M2 SSD and I have another M2 SSD of the same make and size present in the system - currently not in use. I want to clone my Windows 11 partitions to this empty disk and I am hoping that each system will then appear in the Windows Boot manager – using that as the startup menu to select which system to boot.

However I suspect that it may not be as simple as that and that there more be more to setting up my desired mode of operation than I am currently aware of. But being new to UEFI I am hoping that someone here can give me some advice. I confess I am slightly concerned that cloning the partitions to the second M2 disk might leave me with a system that wont boot for some reason. I cant see why that would be the case but I am slightly nervous that it might be, particularly as I am not experienced in using UEFI.

So really hoping for some guidance on how I ought to go about setting up my desired dual boot system using the UEFI boot manager. Hoping someone here can help.

Best Regards

UEFI (newbie)

No problem
@UEFI

run as admin

bcdboot /W:\windows /s: S / f /UEFI

where W is the windows target system , S is the EFI main boot dev (doesn't have to be on the same partition or even the same drive)

Run command from either Windows install media ---- repair system==>cmdprompt ot same thng from Macrium / etc with a windows pe /re cmdline in it.

Use diskpart -- list vol to get the EFI partition -- usually it's a 100MB hidden efi partition --select as S via list vol in diskpart - list vol


Cheers
jimbo

Hi jimbo, Thanks for the quick response. I’ve just re-read my original post and realised I made a critical mistake in the wording (doh, good start eh !), I didn’t mean the Windows boot manager I meant to say that I wanted to use the UEFI Boot Manager in my BIOS to select which disk to boot from.

Presumably with the solution that you have described I would clone my current windows disk (all partitions) to the spare M2 disk using Macrium Reflect (or some other disk cloning tool) and then use the bcdboot command that you have given which would then create a windows BCD on the reserved system partition on the main windows installation disk ?. Guessing this will cause the windows boot menu selection to then appear on booting ?. Is that correct ?.

But I was actually hoping to use the UEFI boot manager present in the UEFI BIOS. If I simply clone my current windows disk to my second disk (as solution above) then if I’ve understood the technology correctly if I select the UEFI boot manager on startup then I should be able to select which disk to boot from as both will contain an EFI system partition and should be detected by the UEFI boot loader ?. Guessing that the menu will probably present some hardware oriented disk addresses rather than a more user friendly menu, but will this work ?. Is there anything else I’d need to do to make it work ?.

Also having cloned ALL of the partitions the first time, if I subsequently want to copy the windows system on the first M2 disk to the second M2 disk I guess that I only need to copy the windows partition ?.

Thanks in advance.

UEFI