Bob,
Using CMOS (BIOS) settings is by far the simplest way to do it if the
motherboard supports booting from different hard drives. That's the way I'd
go if it does. If not, you could buy a swappable hard drive bay with two
trays. The down side is the trouble of shutting down the computer, swapping
drives, and then rebooting the computer. Also, there is the consideration
of added cost. I've done it both ways and either works but the CMOS
settings change is by far the best.
To do it in CMOS, first determine how to access CMOS settings, and then
look for a section called Boot Sequence, or Advanced. If your MB is fairly
new, you should have a lot of selections, including HDD 0, HDD 1, HDD 2,
and HDD 3. To make the installs truly separate, you need to be sure that
only one drive is recognized by the BIOS. The usual way is to say NONE (as
opposed to AUTO) for the drive not being used for the install. Then the
install will go normally as if only one drive is available. Reverse the
procedure and make the other drive available and the first drive not
recognized. Then, once you get both installs working, just go into CMOS
settings and choose which drive you want to boot from and make the other
one go away. This will then show only one hard drive in Explorer and will
truly keep the OS's separate
One thing I've never tried is an install of 98 on one drive and an install
of XP on another drive where XP is aware of the 98 install. I THINK it
would work as XP asks where you want it installed and it goes there but it
may leave some required files on the 98 drive. In this case, you might
cripple the XP install if the 98 install went away. Also, the XP install
will show the 98 drive, but the 98 drive won't list the XP drive if you use
NTFS formatting for the XP install.
Michael
>I want to install two hard drives on my computer with two different
>operating systems (Win98SE and XP Pro). I want to boot them up individually
>as my need arises.
PCBUILD's List Owners:
Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>
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