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2 Drives / 2 copies of Win 7....options?

T

Tim Coates

Junior Member
Ok, here's my situation and hopefully some of you all can give me some pointers. I built one nice computer for the whole family to use. I now have 2 drives and 2 legitimate copies of Windows 7 64-bit. Let's say drive 1 will be my Win 7 Gaming drive. Drive 2 will be by Win 7 media/family use drive. I want to load a pristine Win 7 load on drive 1, get it exactly the way I want it, and use it for my gaming and sim racing. I want drive 2 to be the family computer with Office, all of our media, family games, blah, blah, blah. From what I've read so far, I have a few different options:

Option 1 : Load Win 7 on both and use the dual boot functionality to select which one you boot to. But I've been reading some posts that this is a real P.I.T.A. should you have problems or should you not do it exactly right.

Option 2 : Use virtual machines. But I'm not sure I can train everyone to use this functionality. And what about the performance hit?

Option 3 : Get a SATA backplane for my computer and turn my drives into "swappable" drives where I can just remove my gaming drive, put it on the shelf and put the family drive back in. I'm concerned about wear and tear on the drives as I game often and that would be swapping quite often.

Option 4 : Shut the hell up and just load win 7 on one drive (they are both 500 gig drives) and use the other for doing backups to and if they hose up the computer I can just restore it to a point that I want it.

Any opinions or suggestions? I know some of you have probably done similar. Thanks for any input. This website and forum has been a life saver more than once for me even though I never post. I'm a lurker....🙂
 
Option 4 or...
Wouldn't it be easier to just create 2 different user accounts (one for gaming, one for media, etc)?

For example, I use our living room PC most of the time, but when my daughter wants to use it, I switch over to her account. Everything has huge icons (easier to click on) and her color scheme and things can't be altered. (She had a tendency to move files or folders into other folders trying to double click on things, she's only 3-1/2 years old)
My account is set up for my use (have everything the way i want it, looks the way I want it to), hers for her use (easier to use for her, looks the way she wants it and locked down).
 
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Story down the same road:

Problem: Family keeps screwing up the family computer. When I want it I couldn't have it... Son needs it for school work, wife needs it for online shopping... 10,000 other reasons...

Build wife PC.
Build son PC.
Build Me PC.

Everybody happy. Problem solved.
 
If you want separate disks, the safest way is to use a swappable disk housing. That way, if one PC gets contaminated with malware, it's near-impossible to contaminate the second one. But this technique rules out sharing common data folders on the other disk (music, for instance).

Otherwise, you can keep both disks attached and change the boot order when booting. I believe all motherboards have a "Choose Boot Disk" option during the initial BIOS screens. When you boot from Disk 1, Disk 2 will show as the secondary drive. When you boot from Disk 2, Disk 1 will show as the secondary drive.

Choosing the boot order at boot is pretty foolproof, avoiding the pitfalls of performing a dual-OS boot on a single disk. You may have to deal with permission issues, but if you keep the shared data in public shares the problem should go away.
 
All good suggestions. Thanks to all that has replied. I like the idea with the boot order and going into the BIOS boot menu if I wanted to boot my "gaming" disk. I was just under the assumption from what I've read that even if I booted to whichever one I wanted to it would recognize that the other disk was an OS disk and Win 7 was smart enough to want to change things up on me. If it's as simple as that (which setting the boot order and then entering the BIOS boot menu is as simple as it gets) then I'm all over that. Will either of the Win 7 installs gripe about the other also being a Win 7 install if I boot to it from the BIOS? So here's what I had in mind:

I have my drive ID's (how the BIOS recognizes them) written down and I know which SATA connection each is connected to.

I was going to disconnect my original Win 7 drive.
Connect my new drive to its connection.
Boot up with my new Win 7 DVD.
Do my normal Win 7 loading and configuring (to an extent).
Power back down and reconnect the other Win 7 also.
Go into BIOS and set the boot order to:
1-Boot from original Win 7 drive (SATA #2)
2-Boot from new Win 7 drive (SATA #1)
3-Boot from DVD drive (SATA #3)

Then normally, if I don't hit F11 to go into the Boot menu on startup, will it by default boot to the original Win 7 load? That would be perfect.
Then, only I would know how to boot to my new drive as everyone else just turns it on and goes.

Sorry for all the questions, I just don't want to spend days (which I don't have) trying different ways out and was hoping to get some good advice up front to save me some heartache.

Thanks again for the help.
 
If you are going to install Win7 on your disk, then definitely disconnect any other disks during the install. Otherwise you can end up with boot issues if one of the disks ever gets removed. Disconnecting the other disk(s) keeps the Win7 installs completely independent of each other.

On my Foxconn motherboards, I've set it up (in the BIOS) so I'm presented with a boot menu where I can select another disk to boot from. If I leave it alone, it boots to my "normal" disk after five seconds.
 
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