As Hugh told you, that stuff about "they must both be hard drives, or both be CD/DVD drives" is complete and total nonsense.  I 
can't imagine that anyone working in a professional situation could be so completely ignorent!

What you can do is do whatever you want with HD1, with the o.s. on it.  Then, replace it with HD2 and do whatever you want with it 
with the o.s.

Then, and this may depend on the motherboard - I don't know, put both hard drives on to the same computer.

When you turn on the computer, you will be given a choice on which drive to use.  If you do not make a choice in thirty seconds or 
so, it will choose the default.  (This is how it works with my SATA drives on a one-year old motherboard.)  I am not exactly sure 
how this works, but I **think** that Windows has a pre-loader of some kind that the motherboard calls at initial startup - at least, 
that is what it looks like.  (It might be in the mb loader, however.  I don't really know.)  The effect is, however, that you can 
take your pick between the two installations.  (As a caveat, this may not be available on an older system.)

The nice thing about this setup is that you can move files back and forth between the two hard drives.  The bad thing is that you 
have both hard drives running at the same time.  And, it delays your startup time by a bit.

I have three WD Raptor (SATA) drives which draw quite a bit of current.  I have them mounted in the case, but only keep one 
connected (cords plugged in to the drives) at a time in order to preserve electricity.  Most of my work is done on my VISTA drive, 
but I have PhotoShop on another drive, and I have XP Pro on another for playing games such as Witcher, which were apparently 
developed under XP and may not do so well under VISTA.   This plan is the most klunky and inelegant, but it saves electricity and is 
simple.  You could easily do something like this for what you are describing below.  ( I  leave  the side of my case open, so 
switching cables is not difficult.)  This has a small added benefit that if my main drive is trashed somehow the information on my 
other two drives is still okay.

I assume that you realize that there may be software licensing issues with this type of setup.

HTH

Dean Kukral




----- Original Message ----- 
From: Computer9f
Sent: Sunday, May 24, 2009 6:09 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Dual Booting


Plan-C

I have 3 IDE hard drives.  Two are installed (one is new).  Someone (at another forum, I think) told me that I could install an IDE 
hard drive on the SAME IDE CABLE with my DVDWriter.

I just spoke with the Geek Squad and they say NO - that the PC sees everything on a single cable the same way, that they must both 
be hard drives, or both be CD/DVD drives.  Of course, he also said you could set WINDOWS to let you choose which drive to boot, 
which as I see it looks clearly impossible, since when you are booting, you don't have Windows yet.

<snip>

I want to boot to HD1 when I need to pay bills, check email, etc. (actually USE the computer for something) then boot to HD2 when I 
have time to work on the new OS installation.  Once I am done with the new XP installation (a few weeks), I will want to remove HD1 
and move HD2 into it's place as master on the cable.  Then I can re-install HD3 (my backup drive) back again as slave, where it was 
originally, and backup my NEW system.    <snip>

Thanks,
AnnaSummers

 

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