Looking to have two bootable hard drives on one pc (a few questions)

[idrisguitar]

Basically I am wanting to have my pc, that imp using for university work, to also be used as a slave computer with my studio computer to help give me more resources for my studio,

But I want to keep my hard drive I am using now with all my works and stuff free from all the installed sample libraries and stuff I would need to put on it.

Is it possible to have a second sata hard drive n this computer that will be booting with another version of windows xp. That way it stays totally separate from my Uni work, and I can install all the samples libraries I need as it's solely on that hard drive and not interfering with the one I use for Uni.

First of all is this possible and if so how would I do it, as im sure if I installed a sata right now, the computer would auto boot on this hard disk anyway and just show the new hdd as a new storage drive.

really hope you can help


thanks a lot

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

Yes, you can do what you are describing, but what you would have to do is shutdown the computer, open it up, disconnect a HDD, and reconnect the other HDD when you want to switch back and forth between the two.

 

[idrisguitar]

is there no way to choose which device to boot off?

if i do i do what you say then, do i simply use the same wired that i remove form the first hard drive on the second hard drive right? (although i doubt that would make much of a difference.

its not too much of a bother if i think about it as i will switch every few months anyway.

 

[Kidwell28]

I believe you can edit your boot.ini file to see the two drives. I am not sure how or if this is true, but I know that with Linux and Windows you can edit that to change how they are found, and what Windows (or GRUB in the Linux Side) reads each of them.

Kidwell28

 

[blackhawk13]

If your hard-drives are big enough, you could easily make one of them into 2 partitions and dual-boot from that. That way you won't have to change the cables around and whatnot. And just have the second harddrive accessible by both versions of windows. I'm not sure if that's what you would want, but it would be quite easy to set up. . Good luck.

 

[EricB]

install xp on one. disconnect it. install xp of the other. reconnect first drive. then use your bios to boot one or the other. the reason you have to disconnect the drive the first is because the second will put the install on the first drive because it already have an boot.ini file

if you made the second system vista, you could just put the vista cd in to boot from it without changing the order of the drive in the bios