Is there software to let me choose between two boot hdd's?

[Zero Plasma]

Is there a setup that will let me choose between to os's on different hard drives?

I really don't want to have a partition for them on one drive.

 

[minofifa]

i think the GRUB boot loader can do this can't it? it gave me the option to add OS's from other HDD's i think. I don't have that setup so i'm not sure

i you want to try something commercial. check out system commander by v-com

 

[PottedMeat]

would you be ok with selecting the boot drive from the BIOS?

My Asus A7V133 ( yeah its old ) lets you pick the specific boot drive out of the BIOS. I put WinXP on my Seagate - Primary IDE Channel 1 (HDD-0) and Linux on my IBM - Primary IDE Channel 2 ( HDD-1 ) and switching OSs works fine.

 

[oboeguy]

Ummm, maybe I don't get your question, but the regular NT boot loader (e.g. used by XP) lets you do that. It looks in the file boot.ini (probably in C:\) so you can probably Google for boot.ini to RTFM. You can edit the file directly (warning: not for the no0bish!!!) or even get to it via the XP GUI via System Properties (i.e. My Compute properties) | Startup and Recovery | System startup frame | Edit.

You can even have the same OS loaded different ways. For example:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /safeboot:minimal

(How do you put a code block into a post?)

 

[AdamSnow]

Windows comes with a boot loader that will do this no problem...

 

[nweaver]

grub

 

[lawrenceku]

you don't need grub unless you are using linux (and you can use NTLDR with linux too).

you can boot multiple os's with windows's NTLDR

http://www.devhood.com/tutorials/tutorial_details.aspx?tutorial_id=313