Info The age-old wisdom of installing Windows (11, 23H2) and "you should only have one disk connected during setup"

[mikeymikec]

I've believed it for a long time myself, but thanks to a particularly annoying problem with Win11 Pro, C drive mirroring and feature updates (or lack thereof), I finally did an install today with both disks connected during setup (I had enough of removing M.2 drives for one day!), did a diskpart clean on each one before getting to the "where do you want to install Windows" question, and after setup completed and Windows started, diskpart shows no partitions on the second disk and Disk Management asks the 'new drive' question of "how do you want to initialise this drive?". aka. as pure as the driven snow. I need to look up the etymology of that expression at some point.

So I think I can now say with a fair degree of confidence that it no longer matters having multiple drives connected during setup. However, I would advise that if there's data you don't want to lose on those other drives, then they should only be connected if absolutely necessary (e.g. Windows dual-boot with Windows setups), because otherwise why risk it when there's software playing around with the partition table(s).

 

[bba_tcg]

I've believed it for a long time myself, but thanks to a particularly annoying problem with Win11 Pro, C drive mirroring and feature updates (or lack thereof), I finally did an install today with both disks connected during setup (I had enough of removing M.2 drives for one day!), did a diskpart clean on each one before getting to the "where do you want to install Windows" question, and after setup completed and Windows started, diskpart shows no partitions on the second disk and Disk Management asks the 'new drive' question of "how do you want to initialise this drive?". aka. as pure as the driven snow. I need to look up the etymology of that expression at some point.

So I think I can now say with a fair degree of confidence that it no longer matters having multiple drives connected during setup. However, I would advise that if there's data you don't want to lose on those other drives, then they should only be connected if absolutely necessary (e.g. Windows dual-boot with Windows setups), because otherwise why risk it when there's software playing around with the partition table(s).

I think with the scenario of other disk(s) not having any partitions, multiple drives shouldn't be a problem even with older versions of Windows. I can't recall Windows ever adding partitions to a blank disk. Won't say it couldn't have happened, but don't recall it. The issue, as I remember it, was multiple disks that were already in use.

 

[mikeymikec]

I think with the scenario of other disk(s) not having any partitions, multiple drives shouldn't be a problem even with older versions of Windows. I can't recall Windows ever adding partitions to a blank disk. Won't say it couldn't have happened, but don't recall it. The issue, as I remember it, was multiple disks that were already in use.

It's been a long time for me (because I "followed the wisdom" after getting burnt the first time), and I guess it was a good 20 years ago or so (so Windows 2000/XP era), IIRC I ended up with the MBR on one drive and C drive on another. Whatever the specifics were, it created a needless dependency for the second drive when booting. Maybe it was dual-boot related (though my efforts in those days normally revolved around a single disk setup IIRC).

 

[bba_tcg]

It's been a long time for me (because I "followed the wisdom" after getting burnt the first time), and I guess it was a good 20 years ago or so (so Windows 2000/XP era), IIRC I ended up with the MBR on one drive and C drive on another. Whatever the specifics were, it created a needless dependency for the second drive when booting. Maybe it was dual-boot related (though my efforts in those days normally revolved around a single disk setup IIRC).

If both disks were partitioned, that was guaranteed back then. You would end up in the position of not being able to remove either drive without breaking the Windows installation. Even in a single boot situation.

Most scenarios of having multiple disks, other than initial machine setup, would be with both being currently used for something. And, as you said in the first post, I would still be leery of installing Windows this way, although it would probably be okay today. But why take the chance if you don't have to?