dual-booting with two hard drives

[AvatarD]

Ok, so, here's the deal. For a number of different reasons I want to have two hard drives, both with their own copies of XP (one Home and one Pro) and all their own data inside of one rig, and I'm wondering if it's possible to dual-boot and be able to choose which hard drive and set of info I want to boot from? I found this article, which is pretty close to what I'm doing, I think. I'm wondering if anyone has any other thoughts, has tried anythinkg like this before, or thinks it's just not possible? One of my concerns is that the hard drive which is being relocated to the new rig is going to lose it (or more specifically, XP is going to lose it) when the hardware setup is completely different. Also, it is only a temp situtation, really only a week or two, and so I'm trying to figure out if there's an easy way around the problem besides changing all the boot.ini files. Has anyone ever heard of a boot loader program that could handle something like this? (kinda like linux but not i guess) Any ideas or comments would really be appreciated. THANKS!

 

[Home Built]

Did that with out really trying on one of my older rigs. I had XP Home on my old original 20gig HD. When I got a new 120 gig HD I wanted it to be my 1st drive to boot to.
If I remember correctly I rearranged my cables and jumpers to set my old drive as slave and the new drive as master. I then set my Bios to boot to the master drive only and did the XP install.
When it booted up it asked which operating system you want to start to.
The only problem I found was when I removed the old 20 gig the selection screen still came up. Never did figure out how.

 

[Navid]

You can have XP on two hard drives, each in an active partition. Then, you can go into the BIOS of your motherboard and select which hard drive to boot from. You will not have to deal with the boot.ini then.
You will not need any boot managers either.

 

[AvatarD]

Yea, that was what I was originally just going to do, but I want to be able to boot into either drive without having to switch the BIOS. So if what Home Built is saying happened to him is true, then I should be ok just installing the two, setting them Master/Slave, setting my BIOS, and then on each boot up choosing which I want to use. That would be easy anyways...

 

[Navid]

Make your mind!

If you want to get an on-screen choice as to which one to boot to, your boot.ini needs to be modified. It will be if you install a second XP while the original one is still active.

If you do not want to deal with a modified boot.ini, have one XP on each hard drive and use the BIOS to choose.