Bitcoin Forum

Hello guys,

It is possible, on a computer with 2 hard drives, to use and update the same blockchain using Bitcoin Core?

The first HDD is a dual boot Windows 10 / Linux, and the second is only used for Bitcoin Core and the blockchain.

Yes. As long as you're not accessing or writing to the files at the same time with different instances.

has it been possible do the "not if" with different instances at the 'same' time ?

If the bitcoin core version on both OS's is the same then it shouldn't be a problem running Core with the datadir (bitcoin core's state) path pointed at the same folder. Obviously you can't run two operating systems in dual-boot at the same time so "same time accesses" won't be a problem.

But problems start to rise when you use the same datadir for different versions of bitcoin core because the older version will not recognize some of the fields introduced by the newer version and vise versa (newer version removing some fields). So in that case you must have two different datadirs, and only one of them can ever be used by each Bitcoin Core instance on an OS.

Windows and Linux are using two different files systems but you can read and access everything unless you are using some data encryption, and you can even hide or remove specific hard drive in partition manager software.
Encrypted data is much better than having regular data but it can slow down reading times a lot.