additional hard drive question

[slick2004]

I want to add another hard drive to my present system, the hard drive im adding has an OS already on it, is there anyway i can add it and be able to boot to it as an option?

 

[RavenSEAL]

Depends on the OS, if its windows, most likely not.

 

[Nothinman]

It's not a simple question. Generally, BIOSes these days let you pick any drive to boot from and it'll make that drive appear as "drive 0" to the OSes. But once the BIOS hands over control to the OS it'll do it's own drive detection which may or may not agree with the BIOS drive order. Some OSes, like Linux, deal with this better than others like Windows.

Essentially the only option is to try it and see what happens.

 

[Spikesoldier]

windows 7 installs are pretty resilient, i once ripped a ssd from a intel rig and threw it into an amd machine and no BSOD.

as others have said, simply hit whatever button to bring up the boot menu during POST and select the secondary hard disk to attempt to boot from it.