Dual boot from two hard drives Question...

[Guest]

I have to seperate hard drives with only one partition on each.

1. Seagate Baracuda 200 GB with XP Media Center 2005
2. WD Raptor 80GB with Vista

Both I've had plugged in only one at a time, to my Promise Fasttrak 150
controller card and had both O/S's up and running one at a time. So two
seperate running O/S installs, working one at a time.

Now I want to plug both in and have a choice to dual boot into either one. I
dont' know much about Raid and my controller card and when I plug both in I
seem to get all kinds of issues with them. How can I get these two seperately
installed O/S's running in a dual boot mode with my controller card?

 

[Guest]

Actually I just thought of something...that might be easy, but I need to ask
as I'm not sure...

What if I format that 80GB drive that currently has Vista on it from within
my XP Meida Center instance, and then run the Vista CD from within there and
select this newly formatted drive as where I want Vista installed...will that
then give me the dual boot option once the installation of Vista is complete?
I just don't want to ruin my current XP MCE 05.

Would this be a better method?

 

[KWE]

ChrisMc73 wrote On 6/19/2006 9:03 AM:

Actually I just thought of something...that might be easy, but I need to ask
as I'm not sure...

What if I format that 80GB drive that currently has Vista on it from within
my XP Meida Center instance, and then run the Vista CD from within there and
select this newly formatted drive as where I want Vista installed...will that
then give me the dual boot option once the installation of Vista is complete?
I just don't want to ruin my current XP MCE 05.

Would this be a better method?

I think you have two choices:

1) use your BIOS setup (F2 on a Dell during bootup) to change the active
partition/drive from one to the other, allowing either XP or Vista to
boot. But this is not without dangers, as it makes the other OS
partition visible and this is known to cause problems with, for example,
System Restore.

2) install a boot/partition manager and setup two different boot menu
items, one for XP and one for Vista. Hide the Vista drive from XP and
vice versa. Works the same way as you work it now, but with a software
switch instead of swapping cables.

3) OK, three choices. Buy a hardware drive switcher. These usually
install in one of the optical bays and lets you switch your disk
hardware back and forth without opening the case.