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Question involving 2 hard drives and 2 operating systems

W

Wynner3

Member
Ok, I have 2 hard drives. 1 14.5Gb 7200rpm ATA33 IBM drive and 1 20Gb 7200Rpm ATA66 Seagate Hard Drive. I was thinking of having WindowsMe on the 14.5Gb Hard Drive and XP on the 20Gb hard drive. The thing I'm wondering is, if it is possible to choose which hard drive to load at the time I boot up the computer. Is it possible to do it without buying any additional software? Plus if I do have to get additional software, is it cheap and will one hard drive see the other?

The only reason why I'm asking this is because I have a few games that won't work in XP yet but they work great in Me. I know there is a compatibility option in XP but it didn't work for me. Can anyone help?
 
Yep,

Install Me first, and after that XP. XP will ask during installation if you want to upgrade ME or make a dual boot system. Just make sure you install XP to the right drive/ folder.
XP will ask then during bootup, which OS you want to use.

If you keep both drives as FAT32, then both OS will be able to see both drives.



DaFinn
 
The quickest and easiest (and most foolproof) solution is to get yourself a pair of mobile racks and mount each HDD in one. They can then be turned on by key as you choose with no relationship to the other. If you only have room for one rack, then get two inner trasy and simply swap drives as you choose. You can have any number of configurations this way. I have used it for almost 4 years now, and it works perfectly. I can choose between several trays already set up - can run 98, ME, W2K, XP - even Linux . without worrying about dual boot nonsense.

A more elegant solution is now available from Romtec - called Trios. It allows you to select from 3 different IDE dinternal drives from front panel buttons. It's a bit more expensive, but very elegant.

Trios
 
A few things to consider. You have stated that you will only use WinME for those few games that do not work under XP. Do you *really* want to dedicate and *entire* hard drive just for those games? Almost sounds silly, doesn't it?

Although I primarily use one hard drive, here's what I have done:

On one drive, greated a FAT32 C: volume of approximately 1GB. This volume is common to both WinME and WinXP, but is only used for temp files and such. I gave my primary OS (Win2K for me) about 4GB for apps and the OS itself. I set aside another 2GB or so just for personal files (Word documents and the like). I can then dedicate the rest to games, MP3s, downloads, or whatever ... without limiting this area to a specific OS. If some games work under XP, I can install them there. If not, I float over to ME to install/play the game off of the "games" partition.

In your case, the entire second hard drive could be your games-MP3s-n-stuff drive.

-SUO
 
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