need some help setting up virtually two systems NEW HELP!!

[minofifa]

hi everybody,
well i have had my new computer for a few months now but i am finding my setup is not working as well as i hoped. To start here is my computer:
AMD athlon 64 3200+
1024 RAM (panasonic or pioneer or something)
2 x 120 gig western hard drives
1 x 80 gig western hard drive (windows is on this)
ASUS k8N deluxe motherboard
Radeon 9800 SE

Basically my problem is this: I use my computer for many different tasks and i so i have a lot of software and hardware hooked up to it. I wanted to get a computer to use as a dedicated DAW (digital audio workstation for recording / producing music) but that just wasnt in the cards. Now i'm using the computer for everyting including school work, internet, music production, printing and scanning, some games, video capturing and heavy music collecting (my own CD's). I am finding that with all of this software and drivers on my computer, i am getting a lot of conflicts. For example i can't even get my USB soundcard to work, it keeps uninstalling my onboard network card when i install the drivers for it.

here is my planned solution: i want to partition the 80 gig hard drive and instal several instnaces of windows XP. in one version of XP i am going to strip it down. i"m going to take off all of the drivers for internet, printers, scanners, etc. i"m gonna tweak it to get the most performance for audio production. In the other instance of windows i'm going to install all of the other crap i need in order to do day to day stuff like internet, printing, word processing etc...

Does anybody have any advice for me? i was thinking of using norton partition magic, is this a good idea? can i pick which instance of Windows i want to load when i turn on my computer? will there be any major conflicts for one instance of windows if i set up the BIOS to work better with the other instance of windows? any info or adive would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

 

[DaveSimmons]

V-Com.com System Commander has both partitioning and a good boot manager that works well with Windows XP, linux, and older versions of Windows. I used it recently at work to install XP plus Win2K server to a Dell laptop for trade shows.

I used to recommend PM and its Boot Magic to people, but PM has gotten more buggy since the glory days of versions 2 - 4, and last I checked Boot Magic won't work on an NTFS C: drive.

Every time you reboot your computer it shows a menu of the operating systems you've installed into the partitions, and lets you pick the one to run. You can also set it to auto-start one of them after X seconds if you don't pick an OS.

 

[minofifa]

ya that is exactly what i am looking for. the program is v-com system commander? so how would i go about doing this? install the commander software and then run it to create a partition? cool thanks for the help

 

[minofifa]

ok, so i went ahead and bought this v-com software. I was going to try it so installed it but i didn't have time to actually do anything so i didn't actually run the program, at least i think i didn't. anyways, after i restarted all of my harddrives are not showing up. I used to have an F drive (half of the C drive partitioned), a G and an H drive both of which were 120 gig drives. the only one that now shows up is the C drive.
What the hell happened and how can i get my drives back? i can see them in the device manager and it says they are working correctly but i cannot access them in any way. I don't know much about SCSI, ATA,SATA, IDE etc... so don't ask me too complicated of questions. One thing i do know is that there is no RAIDing going on on my computer. When i look under the device controllers, there is a SATA/RAID controller but there is no SCSI controller, would this maybe be the problem? i have loaed the nforce CD and have checked for a SCSI controller but there is only the SATA/RAID controller.

Any help is much appreciated gents as my school work is on one of these drives....

 

[minofifa]

oh one more thing, the name of the drives have SCSI in them, that is what made me think they were SCSI. I got this name from the device manager

 

[minofifa]

bump