Dual Boot Hell... Win10 and SSDs, is there an issue?

I've been through UEFI hell for days now, trying to get my nice, stable, reliable Hackintosh (Mojave) to dual-boot Windows 10.

Config: Asus MAXIMUS XI HERO, i7 8700K, Sapphire RX580 Pulse 8GB, 2 big WD SATA data drives, 1 500GB SSD to boot Mojave, one 500GB SSD to boot Win10. The SSDs are (Mojave) the on-board m.2 nvme slot 1, and (Win10) an m.2 SSD in a PCIe adapter. UEFI boot with Clover. Made my Win10 installer with Rufus.

After a whole lot of trial and error and googling (because I'm not at all expert or even familiar with boot loaders and UEFI), I finally got a bootable Win10 and could run games on it and so on. It was up for over 24 hours without a hitch or a glitch, during which I spent an hour or two in a fairly demanding Windows game (Assassins Creed Origins) just to see how impressive the DirectX performance was -- I was wowed. But after shutting it down to switch back to Mojave, I couldn't even get to Clover... and so the nightmare began. Anyway, I'll spare you the long sad story. I tried a lot of things that didn't work before finding anything that did work. But I never trashed my MacOS boot disk and Mojave is still running just fine.

In the end I gave up on booting win10 from Clover. Couldn't figure it out. I added a special Clover entry to the boot list using UEFI shell so that Win10 couldn't stomp it, and set up a separate EFI partition for the Win10 SSD, configured with bcdboot. To switch OS I have to pause in BIOS and select Windows Boot Manager on the Seagate BarraCuda SSD, or Clover Boot Manager on the Samsung. It's not that big a hassle.

Please note that Mojave has been rock solid this whole time. No indication that there is any problem with memory, BIOS, etc.

Anyway, Win10's latest trick is this: I do a clean install, laboriously restore apps I DL'd and installed while it was running the first time, boot successfully... then try to start Steam, for example, and Boom, Page Fault in Non-Paged Area BSOD. That is sufficiently annoying, but it gets worse: after that BSOD the Win10 SSD is no longer bootable. The installer Repair options don't work. There's no recourse but (sigh) a whole new clean install, which takes about 2 hours including the file copy. And after that 2 hours of tedium, it might stay up for 10 minutes if I'm lucky.

I can't explain why Win10 was solid for its first 24+ hours, or why it's now borking after only a few minutes of use. I can't explain why it thinks its boot disk is toast and cannot be repaired, yet I can mount it from Mojave (using Tuxera NTFS) and the files look OK.

I ask this question here rather than on a WinDoze forum because I figure as soon as I mention Hackintoshes no one will talk to me in a WinDoze forum :-) also because lots of Hackintoshers have tried and succeeded to get their Hackie to dual-boot WinDoze so perhaps someone has been down this road before me.

Obviously I'm starting to wonder about hardware; so I'm running memtester right now, but with no expectation of finding a problem: Hackie is like I said, rock solid even when maxing out main mem with Parallels Win10 VM plus Steam games plus brew install this and that. I mean, I can't break it.

So, though I know Win10 is fragile compared to MacOS this seems extreme. I'm not an expert systems builder (it's a struggle each time for me to get my Hackintoshes to work) and this is my first use of internal SSDs so I don't know whether there are issues with Win10 and SSDs. Seems like this community is more knowledgeable (and courteous) than average so thought I would dare ask for some advice or pointers. I've wasted at least three days of precious "spare" time trying to get this dual-boot thing figured out, and right now I'm feeling like it might be more cost-effective to build a separate Win10 gaming box :-)

submitted by /u/Tazling
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