Seems to me that you need better advice, I have two DVD drives and three
hard drives. One DVD is on the same IDE cable as one of the hard drives, I
can nominate either as 'master' or 'slave' according to jumper settings and
cable positions. I have another SATA hard drive and a SATA DVD as well as a
USB connected hard drive. The only device I cannot currently boot from is
the USB connected drive, there is no technical reason why not and I'm
working on that!
My previous set up had three hard drives and one DVD all connected via two
IDE cables.
You can enter the BIOS to set boot priorities, usually by pressing the
'delete' key during start up, without having Windows installed.
Windows XP has built in support for dual booting. After installing XP the
boot manager should give you a menu of installed operating systems where you
choose which to boot to.
Robert.
-----Original Message-----
From: Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Computer9f
Sent: Monday, 25 May 2009 8:39 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
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.
So, since my Plan-B to install a third hard drive on the DVDWriter cable
looks kaput, I'm back to square one (or rather on to Plan-C) with my
installation of a second XP boot drive/partition.
I can remove my Backup Disk Drive (HD3) and replace it with my new hard
drive HD2 (where I want to install the fresh bootable copy of XP). Then,
hopefully, I will be able to boot to XP on HD1 or boot XP on HD2. Does this
sound feasible?
If so, what would be my first steps? Do I have to enter the BIOS (is that
F8?) FIRST, and change the boot sequence to DVD > HD2 > HD1, so when the new
install reboots it reboots from HD2 (and not HD1)?
If I then start the XP install from the CD and let it format and install XP
on HD2, and I choose to install it as C:\, will it then bootup as C: (like
HD1) WHEN it is the boot drive? And the non-booting drive will be whatever
letter I assigned it in the booting copy of XP? It is the OS (on whichever
HD that is booting) that is remembering the drive letters, right?
The Geek Squad guy said SETTING UP to boot two systems was complicated (??),
but that you could boot 10 different OS's on ONE HD with different
partitions - did he know what he was talking about? He said there was a way
to choose the boot drive without going into the BIOS each time - if so, does
anyone know how?
Heelllppp guys - where do I start - and what do I do second? I'm on Plan-C
here (and oddly enough it looks like it MIGHT be easier than Plan A or B
did)!
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. I'm out of Plans -
will Plan-C work? Do you guys see any holes in this one?
Thanks,
AnnaSummers
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