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I currently have a dual-boot on my desktop with two partitions on the same hard drive. When I boot up my machine I am taken to a boot menu which allows me to pick which of the two operating systems I wish to boot into. I am about to add another hard drive on which I will put a third operating system.

I know that I can go into the BIOS boot menu and choose which hard drive I want to boot from, but this seems a little cumbersome. Is there any way to have a boot menu that aggregates all of the operating systems across all hard drives?

For instance, if I have HDD 1 with operating systems A and B and HDD 2 with operating systems C and D, can I have a boot menu that allows me to pick between booting into operating systems A, B, C, and D all on the same menu?

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Sure, your boot menu can point at drives on any hard drive. On my old dual drive, dual boot install, with windows installed first then linux, grub autodetected the windows install on another drive and had that as a loading option. Likewise you could configure windows to do the same and chainload a bootloader on another drive with BCD.

In short, as long as the bootloader knows that there's OSes there, it should just work. The syntax for grub, the old windows bootloader and the modern bcd style windows bootloader all support more than one drive having OSes.

While it would be helpful to be aware on how to set up a chainload for your preferred OS, its not essential. Its no harder than setting up a chainload in the same circumstances.

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