Marshall,

you asked:

Is an option to remove my 1st HD and just to get the 2nd drive
working with XP and then reinstall the 1st drive??

The answer is yes you can. I did exactly that last week. I was
struggling to load two Os,s one onto each of two drives so I
disconnected drive 2 and set the cd rom as a slave to drive 1. I
then installed the os on drive 1 as normal. Then I disconnected
drive 1, connected drive 2 and set the cd to slave for that drive. I
installed the os. In each case the drive, as it is the only one
connected at the install time is seen as drive C.

Then I connected them both up again this time making the cd a
slave of drive 1. On reboot the machine finds the boot information
on drive 1 first so it boots into that os. I then loaded a copy of boot
magic onto that os which picked up both drives with their
respective os's. I made drive 1 invisible to drive 2 and drive 2
invisible to drive 1 so that each os can only see it's own hard drive.

It worked great. Hope it works for you.

ps. drive 1 was connected to ide1 at all times with cd as slave and
drive 2 was always connected to ide2 with cd set as slave. Don't
forget to change the drives between master and slave at the
appropriate times as you swap things around.

There are lots of complicated instruction sets for creating dual boot
machines but this proved simple and effective.

Good luck.

George.


George MacIntyre
Computing Support Officer
Edinburgh University
Medical Education Centre
3rd floor Out Patients Department
Western General Hospital
Crewe Road
Edinburgh
EH4 2XU
TEL: +44 (0)131 537 1496

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