Two copies of Windows 11 on two different drives

Been a while since I tried doing this, seems like there were issues with old ver of windows doing this.
Two different drives on same PC, doing so since Windows 10 is about to go bye
Can I just use a backup from drive A and restore to drive B and then make any changes I need to do?

thanks

Please be more clear in what you want to do.

Do you want to clone a system drive into another drive so you can make some changes on the cloned drive?

Megahertz said:

Please be more clear in what you want to do.

Do you want to clone a system drive into another drive so you can make some changes on the cloned drive?

Click to expand...

Yes gonna use macrium to backup windows 11 on drive A , then restore it to drive B

So what are your questions?

Megahertz said:

So what are your questions?

Click to expand...

Can I just use a backup from drive A and restore to drive B and then make any changes I need to do?

I would make macrium images of the current drives on an external USB drive. Keep that in case your run into problems. You can always get back exactly where you are if there is a disaster.

Then, make sure you correct problems, like making sure you have your drives formatted GPT, and have your system able to boot UEFI. If it still doesn't. Ask here at each step ... there are many that can help.

When you've prepared everything, download the windows ISO. The easiest way to proceed is to use rufus to generate a usb install drive. But you can skip this if you have the latest hardware which hass been blessed by microsoft. In fact, microsoft Update may do everything for you.

This is a rough overview, and There are a lot of steps, and you have to get them all right, especially if your computer isn't blessed by microsoft.. Lot of People here will help you. Be patient and do one step at a time.

@man00

Yeah, you could do that or, if I understand correctly, you could also just do an In-Place Upgrade from Win 10 to Win 11 on the Win 10 drive.

I've done both. For example...





This is what I ended up with, but you can arrange things however YOU want.
I only hook one SSD up at a time.

No I'm wanting to backup windows 11 on drive A......Restore the image to drive B and be able to boot to either drive

man00 said:

No I'm wanting to backup windows 11 on drive A......Restore the image to drive B and be able to boot to either drive

Click to expand...

Here's an option. Clean install Windows on drive B.
Replace your B drives C: partition with your A drives C: partition. Can be done with Macrium.

Scott said:

Here's an option. Clean install Windows on drive B.
Replace your B drives C: partition with your A drives C: partition. Can be done with Macrium.

Click to expand...

So, what I'm thinking of doing will not work?

You either backup the original drive (A) to a backup disk and then restore that to the target drive (B), or you can clone directly from drive A to B. If done properly, drive B should be identical to A (clone) and bootable. Then you can boot from drive B and upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11. If anything goes wrong, you just swap drive B with A and no harm done. Isn't that what you are trying to do?