William,

As no one has replied thus far, I'll give it a shot. To be sure, I know absolutely nothing about AOL, so my
reply may be useless to you. With that said, I've always assumed AOL is just an ISP-oriented web browser, is
that correct?
If so, then adding a new hard drive, making it the master, and installing an operating system on it would work
just fine, assuming your motherboard can support it. You would also need to designate it as the boot drive
(active partition). Since you talk about dual booting, I get the impression that AOL is an operating
system(?). If that's the case, then you can still do the above, but you'll need a boot manager program as
well. You might want to throw these questions at the good folk on the PCBUILD list. hth

Al Thompson

----- Original Message -----
From: "William Closure" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 11:23 PM
Subject: [PCSOFT] Dual booting off two hard drives


> OK, folks, be gentle.  I read all these posts about all the things you can do
> with computers, and you get me all excited about the prospects.  I want to go
> out on a limb here, so can you help me out?
>
> I want to get off AOL, and am pleased to see that there may be a way to get
> my favorites converted, and hopefully will be able to do the same with
> address book.  So, what's the next step?  Get a system that is free and clear
> of AOL.
>
> As I have been informed, AOL has taken over a lot of things on my computer
> and changed some settings, not necessarily for the better.  So I was thinking
> (a dangerous thing) since I have a new hard drive, why not disconnect the old
> hard drive, install the new one and load with original operating system, and
> then add the original hard drive as a slave?  For the transition period, if I
> chose, I could boot to the original hard drive and access AOL, as needed, but
> otherwise, I would have a clean hard drive, not polluted by AOL, that I can
> use for a new DSL provider.  As needed, I can go back to retrive anything I
> needed from AOL by booting up on the old drive, but otherwise I will have
> escaped AOL.
>
> So, how do I do this?  (You guys get me past this, I might even jump on the
> Linix bandwagon and escape Uncle Bill!)
>
> William Closure

      "Hold No Punches.." Rode brings you great shareware/freeware
        programs with his honest opinions in this weekly column.
                       http://freepctech.com/rode