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Need to run 2 hard drives independently.

A

affan181

Junior Member
I recently build a new computer with a new hard drvie. I would also like to access my old hard drive from my older computer once in a while and would like to boot from it only. My new hard drive is a SATA drive and old is a IDE. when i boot up they become slave/master and i can see both their contents with my new hard drive being the master. I would like to boot only to my old hard drive, and nothing else. But i am not sure how to do this w/o unplugging the new one. thanks
 
Don't think thats a very good idea....you'll probably hose windows on other hard drive, since it's from another computer, hardware is different.
What would you like to do with old drive as boot....different OS?
 
They both have windows xp on them. I just didnt want any of them to do anything with the other. It would be nice if i cant have it that way. is it possible to have setting in such a way that my new hard drive stays off and only my old hard drive is running.
 
You could diable SATA in bios when you don't want it to be accessed. When you want something off the SATA drive, then restart and activate SATA and it should show up when you get into windows.

Is there some reason you don't want it on all the time? I think it should be fine just sitting there on if you don't do anythig to it.
 
Well you should be able to set in the BIOS which HD you want to boot off of. You can turn off the other drive by either disabling the port in the BIOS or in Windows via the Device Manager.
 
A lot of new motherboards also have a "Boot Menu" during post, press a certain key (ex: on my laptop it's ESC) and a menu will popup asking what you'd like to boot off of HD1, HD2, CDROM, Network, etc. But the way you're phrasing it, sounds like you don't even want to be able to access one HD while running windows off the other one (IE: the SATA drive not being accessable form Windows when running off the IDE drive), in which case, there's a thing kinda like a KVM switch for HDs; you turn the computer off, press a button, reboot and boot from the other HD. I don't know if they work with SATA, though. Removable drive cages are always an option too. Just physically take the drive out when you don't want it to be working.

Edit to ask: Why do you want to boot from your old HD? If all your data is accessable from the old one, why not just leave it? Also, do you have the option of putting together your old computer and networking it to the new one? That way you can boot off the old HD by simply turning on your second rig.
 
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