Is it possible to dual boot XP on seperate hard drives?

[Ichigo]

2 different installs of XP on 2 different hard drives. Can I connect both at the same time and dual boot?

 

[PhreakyMike]

Yea I think it's possible... It's like having a disk partition, but instead of a disk partition, it's a seperate disk.

 

[Brentx]

Yes, it's possible. Once you are done with one XP install, just put the disk in again and start the install process all over again. Just make sure you choose to do it on the other hard drive, and not to over write your other XP install. Next time you boot you can then select which install to boot too. You may want to make it easier for yourself so you know which partition is which. You can edit what the boot loader says by Right clicking on "My Computer" --> Select Properties --> Selecting Advanced" Tab --> Press the "Setting" Button on startup and Recovery --> Clickg the "Edit" button. The information in the Quotes is what the bootloader displays to the user.

 

[orion23]

Yes you can!

 

[bdoople]

I do it now.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Why would someone need to do this?

 

[orion23]

Sometimes is good to have a "test" installation. 1 where you can play with any software with no worries.

it is also good for gaming. No drivers or software corruption. Just basic gaming!

 

[Dadoo]

I have Xp installed 3 times on one pc. twice on one drive that the wife uses and once on the drive I use for gameing. The gameing install is pretty much striped for performace. The wifes install has all the windows bloat that she likes. and one clean install on a small partition. for trouble shooting, and keeping critical files like reg backups.

 

[Cygnus X1]

Originally posted by: orion23
Sometimes is good to have a "test" installation. 1 where you can play with any software with no worries.

it is also good for gaming. No drivers or software corruption. Just basic gaming!

Man that is a great! idea! I have a seagate 160 sata and a 40 gig seagate older 2mb ide drive. I've been killing myself trying to figure out the best way to use these. Man I LOVE YOU MAN!

I will use the 160 sata for gaming and the 40 ide for office crap. I also have a 40 gig 2.5 external I will use as back up. No more of this stupid partitions with different drive letters on same drive. HAHA I just had a moment of clarity!

Funny thing is I just yanked out my 40 gig ide because I was sick of dealing with both of them. And I partitioned the 160, 10gig OS and 140 games and office. The sata is really much faster specially on the VIA sata controller.

Any reason you fine people have to not go ahead and redo my drives like that? Peace Thanks!

 

[montag451]

Also, you could use a boot manager to help you out here as well.

That would be an extra guarantee against things going ape.

Acronis Disk Director has a boot manager as part of that suite, there are many other good ones as well that are around.

 

[konakona]

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
Why would someone need to do this?

So you can use multiple languages. Switching between non-unicode languages gets real tedious requiring reboot everytime, and not everything is guranteed to work anyway. the best way is to have two OSs in such case.

 

[Jojo1971]

harddrive selector

thats what i use in my other pc.. i got 3 os installations in 3 different harddrives- TOTALLY independent of each other.. it only works for PATA (IDE) HDDs.. i wish they'll make one for SATA..

search ebay.. i got mine cheap 2 yrs ago..