multiple OSs in multiple harddrives

[jasonhtml]

i am currently making a gaming pc, and with it im getting a new harddrive. but, i want to keep my old harddrive. i read some posts here and on other forums about multi-booting. but most of them either weren't very helpful or only had to do with partitions.

the harddrive i have right now has Windows XP on it, and the one i dont have yet will have Windows Vista(Ultimate or Premium). so, how would i theoretically go about multi-booting these OSs? do i just plug both in and it will magically work? i doubt it.... but who knows?

and one site, i read that the older OS had to be the first harddrive. so, if i plug my XP harddrive into my SATA1 port of my power supply, and the Vista harddrive into the SATA2 port of my power supply, will this work?

 

[bobojuice]

you can probably just install vista on the new drive and change the boot setting in the bios whenever you want to boot from a different disk.

 

[saltynay]

make the first harddrive have two partitions about 40gb or half of the full harddrive and install vista on the new partition then use a dual boot program like grub to have a quick menu pop up each time you boot I've only don't this with Linux but it should work fine with vista and xp. I would not recommend getting vista until the first service pack is released which will probably be the summer.

Matt

 

[jasonhtml]

i guess i didn't make myself clear enough:

i want to have both harddrives and i dont want to partition any of them. i was just wondering if anyone knew how to do what i was asking and if they could help me.

btw, i asked my friend how to do this, and he told me this:
for my XP harddrive to work with my new pc, it has to be reinstalled(im not sure why, but he said something about hardware changes cause an OS to have problems and that i cant just insert my old drive into my new PC), so, first, i would have to install Vista on the new harddrive that im getting, transfer my files from the XP harddrive to the Vista harddrive using my new pc, while running Vista, so that XP isnt actually running, then reinstall the XP harddrive with XP again.

can someone confirm this? sorry if it is hard to understand.

 

[jasonhtml]

anyone?

 

[saltynay]

Your making it too complicated you can just install them on seperate hardrives no problem but if you are rebuilding the hardware yes you will need to reinstall xp

Matt

 

[jasonhtml]

how am i making it complicated? you said what i just described, really...

 

[saltynay]

but i used less words lol

 

[jasonhtml]

ok, lol. well, the last thing i need to know is which OS to install first. Vista first, then XP, right? so that it will give me the choice of which to boot off of?

 

[saltynay]

I didnt know vista had automatic bootloader installed. I would use a third party one just in case such as "grub" is effective and simple.

Matt