How to Dual Boot Multiple Windows OS Without Partitioning

in this demo I'm looking at how you can install multiple Windows operating systems on a single PC and easily switch

between them we won't be using virtualization and we won't be partitioning the hard drive into smaller

partitions instead I'm going to show you a method of dual booting that you've probably never seen before and the

beauty of it is that it's very simple to implement and you can add or remove Windows operating systems at any time so

why would you want to install multiple Windows operating systems well it means that you can have one computer book for

several purposes maybe you want to separate your work PC from your gaming PC or you just want to experiment with a

different version of Windows another idea might be to have a separate OS for testing software so that you don't have

to mess up your production PC or gaming PC you can have as many windows installations as you had this can take

just note that you'll only be able to use one at a time you'll need to reboot the PC when you want to switch operating

systems note though that you can access any of the operating systems file systems regardless of which operating

system you happen to be booted into the benefit of using this method over virtualization is that you get the full

native access to the hardware which is important for things like gaming or video editing you probably wouldn't want

to do those activities on a virtual machine each operating system is independent of the others and you can

still take advantage of virtualization if you want just install your favorite hypervisor on any of the operating

systems so how does it work let me give you an example you've already got windows installed and for this example

let's say that you're running Windows 10. we'll call your current version of Windows the parent Os or host OS this is

the main OS which is installed normally just like any other Windows PC this main OS will be ever present we can't remove

this one as it's the main parent OS for any additional operating systems that we install let's call them a child Os or a

guest OS we can easily add and remove any child os's and you're only limited by the size of hard disk that you have

in the PC as we'll need disk space for each operating system that you install so the larger the hardest that you have

then the more operating systems you'll be able to install remember earlier when I said we aren't going to use Virtual

realization well that was true but we will need to create a virtual hard disk to install our additional operating

system onto all this means is that we are creating a virtual disk file and it will act just like a normal hard disk

and we'll install another version of Windows onto that virtual disk for any additional operating systems that we

install we just create a new virtual disk for each one this means it's simple to add or remove a Windows OS at any

time if we decide that we don't want my OS anymore then we can simply delete the hard disk file from the main hard disk

and it's as simple as that so let's install our first additional operating system I'm on a PC which has Windows 10

installed this is the power and Os for this PC I'm going to install Windows 11 as an additional operating system one

quick tip before we go any further is to go into your device manager and make a note of some of the key devices in your

system this is just in case you need to download any driver software for the new operating system so you'll know what

devices to download the drivers for if Windows doesn't automatically install them for you okay first I need to create

a virtual disk so I'll right click on the Windows start button and choose Disk Management from the list don't worry

we're not going to be resizing any partitions we're just using Disk Management to create our first virtual

disk I'll highlight my current windows partition then click on the action menu then choose create vhd I'll click on

browse to choose a location to store the virtual disk so I'll browse to my C drive and I'm

going to create a folder called vhdx and then inside the vhdx folder I'll name the disk file windows 11.vhdx

you'll want to make a note of this file name and path as we'll need it later when it comes to specifying the size of

the virtual disk consider that you'll need around 20 to 30 gigabytes for a typical Windows operating system and

that you'll want to factor in future Windows updates plus any software and data that you want to install if you're

undecided on the size I recommend starting off with a small hard disk as it's really easy to increase this later

if you need more space it's not so easy to make a drive smaller once it's already been created so always start

with the smaller size and increase it later as and when required so I'll make this drive 50 gigabytes in size

we then need to choose the disk format either of these options are fine for an operating system vhdx is the newer of

the two formats and supports disks larger than two terabyte and it's also resilient to power failures so I'll

choose that one we then need to choose the hard disk type choosing a fixed size will allocate the full size of the disk

up front and choosing dynamically expanding will create a small disk which will then grow as you add data to it

I'll choose Dynamic which will be more efficient as I might not use all the disk space available so there's no point

in allocating disk space up front if I don't use it I'll click on OK to create the virtual disk which then appears in

Disk Management as if it was a real disk and if we look at the disk file in File Explorer

we can see that although it's a 50 gigabyte disk it's only four megabyte in size at the moment as there isn't

anything on the disk yet but the file size will increase as we start adding data to it we're now ready to install

Windows 11 onto this new virtual disk so I'll insert my windows 11 installation media and restart the PC to start the

installation I've booted up into the Windows setup program I'll click on next then install

now I'll accept the license terms then click next

we need to choose a customized install we then need to choose where to install Windows you'll notice that you'll only

see the disks and partitions for the existing Windows 10 pair and Os we need to attach the new virtual disk that we

just created so to do that we press shift and F10 to open a command prompt first I'll just check that I can see the

virtual disk file that I created earlier so I'll change to the C drive and then change to the vhdx folder

if we type dir we should then see the windows 11 virtual disk next we need to go into disk part which is Microsoft's

disk partitioning tool I'll select the virtual disk by entering the command select v-disc file equals c colon

backslash vhdx backslash Windows 11.vhdx which is the name and path of the virtual disk that I created earlier you

should see a confirmation message to say it was successfully selected if you get an error at this point then check that

the path and file name is correct you can enter the command list volume to confirm the drive letter for your

windows partition it's normally C drive but sometimes it might get picked up as a different Drive letter during Windows

setup next we need to attach the disk by entering the command attach v-disc you should get a confirmation message to say

that the disk was successfully attached we can then exit disk part and close the command prompt

if we then click on refresh and scroll down we should see the new 50 gigabyte disk is attached

select the new disk and click next Windows 11 will then install normally just like it would on any other PC I'll

skip ahead through the rest of the installation just for the purposes of the video so that's the installation of

Windows 11 now complete let's restart the PC and see how we select which operating system to use so whenever you

turn on I'll restart your PC you're now greeted with the boot menu the new operating system will become the default

option to boot into and there's a 30 second countdown timer once the timer gets to zero it will automatically boot

into the default Os or you can just manually select the OS to boot into you can also go into options where you can

change the countdown timer or change which operating system should be the default Choice let's go ahead and boot

into the new windows 11 Os from here it just works like any normal PC if you didn't already know that the OS was

installed on a virtual disk then you wouldn't be any the wiser if we're going to file explorer and look at the drives

the C drive is the new windows 11 OS and the D drive is the Windows 10 parent OS I like to rename the disk to make it

easier to display language between them so you might rename the C drive to Windows 11 and the D drive to Windows 10

and you can access the files on both drives if we go into system settings and click on the advanced tab

then click on the settings tab under startup and Recovery you can also change the default OS and countdown timer from

here you can be more specific with the countdown timer and this is available regardless of which OS you currently

booted into okay I'm just going to quickly repeat that process and install another OS this

time I'll install Windows 8. by the way you are able to install more than one copy of the same OS it doesn't always

need to be a different OS than the parent OS for example you could have two or more installations of Windows 10 or

two or more installations of Windows 11 or you can just mix and match it's irrelevant which OS is installed

although I would recommend avoiding Windows 7 not least because it's no longer a supported operating system and

won't receive security fixes but because it doesn't fully support secure boot on UEFI systems so it's highly likely that

it will not boot into Windows if your PC is currently configured with a UEFI bios okay I've now added Windows 8.1 so I've

got three operating systems installed if you decide you no longer need one of the operating systems that you've added

then you can simply delete the virtual disk file from the main hard disk browse to your main parent OS which in my case

is the Windows 10 OS and navigate to the vhdx folder containing your virtual disks and simply delete the OS that you

no longer want I'll delete the windows 11 OS that means that OS will be completely gone and you'll recover the

disk space back to the main hard disk and power and Os the boot entry in the boot menu will

still be there so we need to delete that manually to delete an option from the boot menu open a run prompt and enter Ms

config click on the boot Tab and select the OS entry that you want to remove click on

delete then click on apply that entry will then be removed from the

boot menu and finally you can rename the boot entries to something more descriptive this is useful if you have

more than one install of the same OS for example if you have two installs of Windows 10 by default they will both be

called Windows 10. if you want to distinguish between the two then you can rename them to something more

descriptive unfortunately there is no GUI method for this but we can do it relatively easily from the command line

using the BCD edit tool open a command prompt with admin privileges first enter BCD edit forward slash enum to get a

list of existing boot entries make a note of what it says for identifier so in this example I'm going to rename the

Windows 8.1 entry to Windows 8.1 for gaming so I'll enter the command BCD edits forward slash Set current

description and then whatever I want to call it so Windows 8.1 for gaming and you should

get a confirmation message to say it was successful I'll also rename the Windows 10 entry but you'll notice that this one

has quite a long identifier to type in you can either use the copy and paste facility or simply reboot into that OS

and then when you use BC edit to show the list the Windows 10 Android will be labeled current so it's a bit easier to

type in now they're both renamed I'll restart the PC to see the new boot menu

so here's the boot menu with the updated names for each OS let's boot back into Windows 10 as there's one last thing I

want to show you which is how to increase the capacity of a virtual disk if you recall from earlier I recommended

that you create a small disk to begin with as it's easier to increase later if you need more space so to increase the

size of a virtual disk make sure you boot it into the main parent os I'll increase the size of the Windows 8 disk

I created earlier which started out as a 50 gigabyte drive and now want to increase the capacity of this disk so

I'll open up a command prompt with admin privileges I'll go into the disk part tool by typing this part art my command

prompts I'll select the virtual disk I want to increase by entering the command select disk file equals cvhdx windows

8.vhdx we should then get confirmation that the disk was successfully selected next I'll increase the disk to 80

gigabytes we need to specify the size in megabytes so I'll enter the command expand V disk maximum equals 80

000. we get confirmation that the disc was successfully expanded now that this size has been increased we need to

extend the partition to use the extra space let's attach the disc by entering the command attach v-disc we should get

a confirmation message to say that this was successfully attached I'll enter the command list volume to get a list of

volumes available I can see my Windows 8 volume is labeled as volume 3. so I'll select that volume by entering the

command select volume 3. we should get a message to say the volume is selected I'll enter the command extend we should

then get a message to say that the volume was successfully extended we'll connect it out of this part and the

command prompt and if we're looking file explorer we can see the disk is now upgraded to 80 gigabytes or just under

the size is a bit lower because the real size of a megabyte is 1024 bytes so to be totally accurate we would have needed

to increase the disk by eight one nine two zero megabytes okay I'll restart into the Windows 8 OS

and check the disk now we're back in Windows 8 let's open File Explorer and check the new disk

size and we can see the disk is now showing us nearly 78 gigabytes we can also confirm that by looking in the Disk

Management utility okay that's it for this demo if you enjoyed it then please give it a like

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