Benefit of installing W10 with both drives connected?

[sswilson]

The general consensus seems to be to only have one drive connected while doing an initial install and then connect extra drives once windows is installed. I know that failing to do so ties the secondary drives to the OS and that removing them from the system afterwards causes the OS to fail a boot (not sure if there's an easy way to repair that), but what if any is the benefit to having them active during install so that they're tied to the system?

 

[crazyea]

I always disable them because the drives never get lettered in the way I want them (ie, nvme drives always get assigned letters after my storage sata drives)...Plus it gives me a sense of security that I wont accidentally delete or overwrite the wrong drive, especially since my drives are the same model and size.

EDIT: One other thing, I never had a failed boot from removing a secondary drive after windows is installed and up and running, even when I left the drive attached during install. I never heard of that.

 

[sswilson]

I've had it happen to me more than once. My understanding is that the install puts system files on the secondary drives which then cause the boot to fail if they can't be read during boot.

But yeah.... the primary purpose to only installing on one drive is to prevent accidentally overwriting a data drive you're transferring over. (Although, these days, OneDrive does my critical data backup duties so I'm a lot less worried about deleting the wrong thing).

 

[djbrad]

I always disconnect any secondary drive. As said, the boot files could be installed on the other one, or you could erase / overwrite something.

 

[lowfat]

Never disconnect secondary drives and never had a problem to be honest.

 

[Coach]

I will throw my hat into the "always disconnect other drives" ring. I too have had issues with the boot manager being installed onto drives other than the intended OS drive. As mentioned, once the drive with boot manager is removed from the computer, booting will be borked.

Why doesn't M$ let us choose where it gets installed is beyond me.

 

[gingerbee]

I only have the main drive plugged in when installing cause I have had problems with booting if the second drive is removed. Don't know if it still happens really just a habit I have gotten into. that and I also don't like windows picking my drive letters.

Don't know of any benefit of having 2 or more drives during install

 

[Izerous]

The only issue i have seen people encounter is really the sata vs ACHI selection in BIOS. Otherwise once I have windows installed the last thing I want to do is physically go back inside the system and install a drive. Once windows is booted i'm already opening ninite.com and getting stuff installed.

 

[Marzipan]

would this be an issue if both drives are NVMe?

 

[djbrad]

Hummm the same issue could happen I think. Unless the bios has an option to disable the drive, the only way is to unscrew it.