One PC with several SSDs. Can I install separate Windows 11 installs in three of them and triple boot?
Hi. I've just built a new PC (Ryzen 7, 32 gb DDR5, MSI ATX X870E board, GeForce 5000 GPU).
What I'd like to is have two three instances of Win 11 on it as follows:
1. **Win 11 Pro for work.** Only work software installed. Syncs with my phone. Regularly backed up. I would hate to have to reinstall this for any reason and so I'll lock it down to minimum necessary software and official updates only. I don't want this to see any of the other partitions/drives (i.e. "mount" them in Windows Explorer) if that is possible.
* 2. **Win 11 Home for gaming.** For gaming, modding and emulation. I plan to run this de bloated and optimized using WinToys and debloat scripts. I also plan to use this OS to install Ryzen Master and MSI Afterburner to undervolt my CPU and overclock my GPU. I might reinstall this once a year or so if something goes wrong. This can see all partitions except #1. * 2.1. Dedicated game install drive/partition * 3. **Win 11 Home for projects** (LLMs, Python/R for statistics classes, volunteering) and media storage/curation and editing. I will be applying a basic set of Wintoys tweaks to keep a lot of the Win 11 nuisance in check (minimize telemetry, old style right click menu). This can see all partitions except #1. I'll probably end up re-installing this one a ton because I'm going to be a trying a bunch of new stuff on this. * 3.1 Dedicated media and personal document drive/partition. Some of this syncs to Google Drive/OneDrive but not regularly backed up.
I have three NVME SSDs (motherboard has three NVME slots) and two SATA SSDs, so each of the above could be it's own dedicated physical drive.
Questions -
1. Is it possible to boot off of multiple Win 11 installs/instances on the same motherboard/UEFI? If so, how do I set that up? I don't mind buying two or three licenses of Windows for the same machine. 2. Are there any multi boot tools that could help with this arrangement? Will TPM/Secureboot be a potential issue. 3. How do I stop Windows from detecting a drive and "mounting" it so its accessible from My Computer/Explorer? 4. Can I encrypt drive #1 (Bitlocker) and still have the ability to multi boot?
I've spent some time describing what I want to accomplish. Maybe there is a better way to accomplish this than what I have proposed above? I would appreciate suggestions.
Cheers!
October 10 edit: **Thank you** for the excellent advice and pointing me to tools like BCDedit and rEFInd. I'm going to dive deeper into VMs and VHDs (are those related?). I still think I want a dual boot system in case I want to install CachyOS/SteamOS at some point in the future.