I have an ASUS Maximus XI Hero Wifi Motherboard with three drives attached: a m.2 Samsung 970 EVO, a SATA Samsung 860 EVO, and a big SATA WD Red old fashioned spinner. The m.2 970 EVO has my Win 10 installation and utilities/games, the SATA 860 EVO is currently empty, and the SATA WD drive has all my documents/music/movies/etc.
Since I'm not even using the SATA 860 EVO at the moment, I'd like to image the m.2 970 EVO onto it, and then be able to select which drive to boot from. I'd use the m.2 drive for usual business, and I'd like to be able to use the SATA 860 EVO for testing out different software and whatnot without affecting my primary install (and be able to easily revert back if something catastrophic happened). I won't be swapping between these two boot options more than once every few weeks.
Normally, I'd just image the drive over, and then go into BIOS and enable one OS drive and disable one OS drive at a time so they're totally independent from one another and couldn't see each other. However, on the ASUS motherboard, I can't disable the m.2 drive - only SATA drives. It does let me manually choose which drive to boot from.
So, if I want to boot using the m.2 OS drive at the moment I can just disable the SATA drive easily and be done.
But if I want to boot using the SATA OS drive, it leaves me with three questions:
- If I want to boot off the SATA OS drive, can I just manually select to boot from it in BIOS, and then once Windows 10 loads remove the m.2's drive assignment under Disk Management and be sure that particular Windows 10 OS instance will leave my original m.2 install alone?
- Since I imaged straight from the m.2 to the SATA will it believe it's C: and have paths in tact?
- Will the SATA somehow be able to reach back to the m.2 drive and affect anything?
Thanks in advance for the help - I really appreciate it!
