Dual Boot question

[nobodytil2015]

I've decided to put a second internal hard drive in my pc. The second hard drive would have a separate OS. Is it possible to choose which hard drive and OS loads at boot up, while the other hard drive (and OS) is simply disabled.

Ideally, each hard drive would have no idea that the other exists...

Been searching forums for a while and haven't found a simple decent explanation.

Would appreciate any advice.

 

[jules4099]

I think something like this would suit you. Assuming you have two internal drives going, if both OS are Windows based, they will still see each other as a volume, and if set up correctly you can have a menu after POST as to which OS you'd like to boot to. If one is Linux and one is Windows, I think the Linux could still read and write to the NTFS, but Windows could not read the Linux drive, without some help anyway. Windows would still see "something" there though. And one if the Elitist-Mac-Snobs will have to answer about that.....other popular OS. That hard drive carrier will provide physical separation. Hope that helps!

 

[Aflop]

I think something like this would suit you.....

There are a million ways to do this without messing about with removable drive cradles.

But how long is a piece of string?
@ the OP;
What interface are your drives running on? IDE, SCSI, SATA?
What OS's are you trying to dual boot?
What file system will each OS use?
What BIOS version does your motherboard run on?

Most BIOS code after 2000 will allow you to set a boot order on IDE drives, same with SCSI and its easy to stop an OS mounting a partition in any Windows / Linux / Mac platform.

If your PC is is utterly ancient then download GDisk http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/2002112213111525 and use the /hide or /-hide switches to control drive access.

It was a pretty vague question from the OP, so either provide more info or drop me a PM. When people actually understand what you intend to achieve, you will get far more coherant answers

 

[nobodytil2015]

I have an old Dell xps400. The original hard drive (we'll call it "HD-A") is a SATA drive with an original dell copy of windows xp media center. I have alot of original software on this drive, and I don't want to fill it up with games. XP is on a Fat32 partition. The rest of the drive in NTFS.

So, I found an old IDE hard drive lying around (we'll call it "HD-B"). Since there were no PATA slots available on my mobo, I bought a nifty IDE to SATA converter. I loaded an extra copy of xp-pro and am making this my game drive. The whole drive is formatted NTFS.

What I want:

-To be able to select which drive to boot from when turning my machine on.

-To do so in way that doesn't conflict with the way either OS functions (I've seen some pretty funky things happen when trying to dual boot 2 different copies of xp...system restore errors, system files interacting with each other, etc.)

-To keep HD-A pristine (no changes in Master Boot Record, no chance of irreparably screwing up the info on it).

---------------------------------

After way too much time searching through forums, I've come up with this as my plan of attack:

Make HD-B the primary drive in SATA slot 0. Then load a program that will manage/create a boot menu on startup (such as BCDeasy). This will leave the MBR in HD-A untouched.

The only thing I'm worried about is HD-A and HD-B being able to "see" each other. I'd like to avoid that.

Bios version:
DELL - 7 Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS version 1.10 A05

---------------------------------

Any advice on my method of tackling this problem or what boot programs to use would be great.


And by the way...

I've been playing SOD off and on for years. I've lurked these boards more than I'd like to admit. The community here is amazing, and no other game has kept me coming back for so long. Kudos to everyone for simply being here and keeping it all going.

 

[Abelfaec]

Well, there are several really complicated ways of doing this; the easiest way i can think of (depending on which os's u'r using) requires your bios to allow you to boot from a usb external. If you can update your bios to enable this, or the functionality is already there, u'r golden. In this case you would set priority to external USB hard drive, and then just reboot with it unplugged to boot the one on your internal drive. I would recommend putting a nfts system on your local system, and a eft (linux/macos) on the external, as linux/macos will allow you to mount the ntfs drive and access file,s music, etc (as long as the permissions and encryption aren't funky) whereas i am fairly positive windows doesn't recognize linux formatted partitions (not out of the box at least, there might be mods for this).

Sorry this took so long, i'm emailing you via your profile (if it's enabled) now to let yah know there's another method.

 

[kyzarvs]

First off FAT32 is kinda icky and media centre should be able to convert to NTFS as standard - you should think about that as a separate job at some point. There is no perfect filesystem imho, but NTFS is a lot better than FAT32, while being some way behind journaled systems such as ext3.

As to dual booting - if your PC has SATA controllers in it, then it i almost certainly new enoug to have a 'Press F12 (or whatever key) now for boot selection' on startup from your BIOS. Can't you just use that? I used to when I was dualling XP / Linux until I realised the boot options some flavours of Linux can install are slightly easier to use.

 

[zishbu]

Looking at the original post, I can offer some advice since I do the same thing.

I have two drives, in the BIOS they are SATA0 and SATA1

SATA0 - WIndows 7 setup
SATA1 - OpenSuSE 12.1

I almost always run SuSE, I dont want it to see or even know about the other drive when its running, and on the rare occasion I want to run Windows I dont want it to see my other drive.

The easiest way for me to do this is to simply enter the BIOS and disable the SATA port for the drive you want hidden, and reboot. Then swap it back when you're ready to go back.

Obviously if you switch back and forth that may be a little bit of a pain, but I hardly do it and its easier than cracking open the case.