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Dual boot on a laptop

M

mlody

Senior member
I have a work laptop that is pretty good for what it is. It currently has 128gb SSD with my work OS (win 7 ent) and also a removable bay with dvd-rw drive.

Since I sold my Windows desktop, I would like to use the work laptop for some light personal work at home and was thinking about buying a removable caddy for 2nd HDD and another SSD (250gb) for my personal OS (win 7 ultimate most likely).

My problem is that the moment both drives are in and regardless of what OS would boot, they would see each others secondary drive. Is there a way for my personal OS to not see the work OS?
The solution for my work OS to not see my personal OS will be simple, I will remove the caddy and put the DVD drive, but when I boot from the OS on my caddy (personal OS) i wont be able easily remove work OS? Technically, I couold remove the work OS drive, but it would be as convinient and seems like a hassle doing it long term?

Has anyone delt with similar situation? Is there a decent solution? I was thinking about turning up bit locker (not sure if that would help), playing with local policies to restrict access to certain drive letters, not sure if removing a drive letter, also removes it from the actual OS cauinsg boot problem?

I appreciate any help.
 
Is there a way for my personal OS to not see the work OS?
Click to expand...
You can't make the OS completely blind to the other drive, but it's trivial to keep the OS from mounting the other drive. Under Disk Management you can set a drive as "offline", which will cause Windows to ignore the drive.

Of course this only works if you have admin access on both OSes. If your work OS has you locked out, this wouldn't work (I'm assuming you don't want your work seeing the content of the second drive).
 
Thank you for all the responses. Yes, I am an admin on my work OS, and obviously, I will be one on my personal OS.
I will try those suggestions once I receive my caddy and SSD - should be early next week.

Thanks
 
I had a similar ambition, "use the work laptop for some light personal work at home," but went about it a different way. I just set up a virtual machine. Works great at keeping "personal" and "business" nice and separate.
 
ketchup79 said:
I had a similar ambition, "use the work laptop for some light personal work at home," but went about it a different way. I just set up a virtual machine. Works great at keeping "personal" and "business" nice and separate.
Click to expand...

I was going to go vm route for this, but my laptop has way to much corporate bloatware that slows it down to its knees and not much free space left. At this point i would rather have a clean system that boots up in few seconds.
 
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