Paul said:
I'm getting some hot swap drives so that I can use different OS's on the
same computer and understand I can use boot software to chose the OS I
want to boot to but I have questions about installing new OS's on the
hot swap drive.
Should I unplug the internal drives, insert the hot swap drive and
install the OS there then I can choose which drive to boot to in the
BIOS or is there another, better way to install new OSs on these swap
drives? I have not tried using virtual pc software to do so but read
where someone suggested it. I'm new to the hot swap world and am not
sure the best, safest way to do this.
Also, does Acronis allow this to be done other than cloning an OS?
Thanks
Might be helpful to give more detail on what you're trying to do.
Multi-Boot is one issue.
Booting from removable drives is another.
Hot-swap is something different.
If SATA drives are involved, there are other issues.
USB/Firewire, yet another complication.
Back in the old days of win98, I had two IDE "cold swap" sockets.
I could slam drives in and out of either hole and it just worked.
But Win2K and XP got very particular about which drives were where.
Seems that the BIOS assigns drive letters. Then the initial part of
windows uses this assignment, then some other part of windows
looks up the previous configuration in a table
and pulls the rug out from under itself.
Would get half-way thru the boot process and bluescreen.
In win98, I could plug in drive B, clone A to B, remove A and put in the
drive from B and it would work fine. Notso with 2k/XP. Depending
on how the partitions were set up, merely plugging in drive B would
cause A not to boot...ever again. I never could pin down the conditions
that caused it.
That's when
I gave up on adding/removing bootable drives after the system
was built.
If you (cold) swap a bootable drive and the booting OS thinks it's in
the same place as when it was installed, it should be fine.
Recent threads suggest that you can't restart windows without rebooting,
so hot-swap, depending on what you mean by hot-swap, wouldn't be possible.
If you're gonna experiment with this, make sure you have everything
backed up.
If you can live with the scant hardware support, virtualPC is
a cleaner solution. Sun VirtualBox has better hardware support,
but that's a mixed blessing. There's some USB support, but I've
never made it do anything useful. The operating systems fight
over who is in charge of the device connected to the port.
If you boot from the Acronis CD, it works very well backing
up partitions. The backups can be restored to a different disk.
NONE of this has addressed multi-boot. I've been successful
with booting multiple operating systems as long as I set it up
and left the hardware alone...which contradicts the hot-swap concept.
So, depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
