How would YOU configure these drives?

[Caveman]

Perhaps you remember a thread from about a week ago when I was trying to get an SSD and HDD to play nice with one another in a dual boot config. Long story short, I've "given up" and will start from scratch.

Here's what I have:

Qty 1, 1TB HDD
Qty 1, 500 GB SSD

Here's how I want to configure:

• 500 GB drive: 250 GB partition for my wife to install Win 10 and Programs (master partition, for default boot)
  
• 500 GB drive: 250 GB partition for my kids to install Win 10 and Programs
• 1TB HDD with 200 GB partition for Win 10 and a few small programs as required
  
• 1TB HDD with 800 GB partition for Files

• I want to boot into the 250GB portion of the SSD (wife's) but have my kids be avail as a dual boot option.
• I want both my wife's and kids SSD to be able to see the 800 GB files partition on the HDD
• I don't care about the Win 10 HDD OS... It's only there in the event of an emergency (SSD goes belly up, etc...)

I have easy access to each disk so I can install them one at a time, etc... To help the OS not get confused and established the correct order and set up the dual boot correctly.

Please tell me what order I need install/configure to be successful with the plan above.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

The answer to your question is pretty easy to google. (How to set up multiple versions of Windows on separate partitions.)

That said, it's a terrible plan.

Do the 500 GB SSD with one Windows 10 install, you apps, and multiple user profiles/accounts, and 1 TB HDD for data. Done.

If the SSD goes belly-up, you can boot from a recovery CD for whatever it is you think you need to do.

 

[Valantar]

Completely agree with @dave_the_nerd. What's the reasoning behind the separate installations? Virus/malware avoidance? From my experience, unless each partition is encrypted separately, a virus that gets admin privileges will be able to infect any and all installations and partitions available. As such, you're just creating more work for your self. Not to mention that avoiding viruses and malware is pretty crucial computer education for the kids. Regular backups of anything important is a requirement, regardless of this. The user account system in Windows is plenty robust in terms of separating stuff the kids should have access to from what they shouldn't have access to, as long as you don't give them an admin account. If the reasoning behind separate installations is that you can give them an admin account (so that they can install games, for example) without them accessing your wife's files/data or messing something up, that won't work. Any Windows admin account is able to gain access to files "owned" by another windows admin account through a simple click in one checkbox.

Oh, and by using one Windows install with multiple accounts, you avoid wasting drive space on multiple installations of applications used by everyone, such as web browsers, office and antivirus. And games. And pretty much everything else.

To reiterate:
500GB: one partition, one Windows installation, two (or more, as required/wanted) users.
1TB: One partition, for data.

 

[Caveman]

Thanks for the responses.

The idea is that I want the kids to be able to screw up their own drive without messing with ours. They can install games, etc... And if they pick up something bad along the way, the assumption is we can surgically remove the issue and still be productive on our drive. We loaded the OS on each disk separately, so there is no real connection to the other disk except through the GPT metro loader at boot.

I just like the idea of complete and total physical drive separation as a safety measure. I can also hide our drive from the kids OS in disk management as far as I know, but perhaps I'm missing something... My kids aren't going to be hacking into our disk or anything but the fact that they won't even be able to see it I see as a failsafe. I also like the idea of multiple OS for redundancy to keep working "seamlessly" on the same laptop even if a drive goes down... Also, selective backups are also much easier... Again, maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not seeing how the multiple account strategy is relevant to what my end goal is. That said, I'm willing to accept woeful ignorance here as I learn the lingo and seek to better understand...

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I wouldn't totally discourage you from doing it that way. The conventional wisdom suggests a single OS install with multiple accounts. But it makes sense -- if the kids bork their own Win 10, they won't necessarily bork yours.

My own interests may almost dovetail with your inclinations on this matter of disk organization.

I wanted dual-boot Win 7/ Win10, and put both OS partitions on the fastest NVMe drive. For additional programs, I decided to add a 2TB HDD with a 1TB volume for each OS -- keeping the program installations separate. A third disk provides common space for shared user files.

I came to it this way because I wanted to cache the second disk to either NVMe caching volume or to RAM and separately for each OS, to avoid "off-line" writes between the OSes. So the two volumes on the 2TB disk are totally isolated to each OS version.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Are there really viruses that are going to look for unmounted drives/partitions and add them before infecting them? I'm skeptical. It may be possible, but...

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Don't give the kids Administrator privileges. Problem solved.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Don't give the kids Administrator privileges.

Or the wife.