I have two identical hard drives which I was going to configure as RAID for backup purposes. I am now thinking of trying different setups on the disks as I do a lot of on line gaming and sometimes get conflicts with other Microcrap...I mean Microsoft programs.

Can I st up the BIOS to give me an option of booting from either drive with XP? Then I can have one drive just for gaming and one for all the other programs?

Is this the best way to go? (I have already loaded virtual pc but as my current disk is fairly loaded did not want to re-install all my programs onto the virtual and then reconfig the existing ...if you see what I mean?)

Help please:confused:

Most computers have a boot menu option, F8 or F12 (will say at bottom of post screen "Press FX for boot options" (or similar) thats how I dual boot, saves messing around with the boot sector of one (or both) of the drives.

just install windows on both drives and it will come up with the option of which installation to boot into.

just install windows on both drives and it will come up with the option of which installation to boot into.

yeah, but then remove one, or decide not to use it, and it just so happens its the windows that's on the primary drive, thus killing chances of booting either.

I have hard drives in cradles/ caddies
Drive 1 (say) contains Xp OS and all the apps that I use
Drive 2 contains Xp OS and software that I trial, if for some reason it screws up I just re-install the OS

May I suggest that you treat your computer to a UPS, one that provides auto-shutdown of the computer. I have mine set to shutdown if the power is off for more than 5 minutes.

Mike

you can select a primary drive to boot and a slave drive it will tell you what button to press you start up normally (f12, or shift and something)

Thats what I usualy do, and just switch from one to the other when I need to log on to the other dirve

Thanks for the help. I looked at installing xp on the second drive but "chickened out" as I thought I might screw up the original instillation.

I had put the xp disk in the cd drive and then booted up but then thought it might over write the existing copy. Can anyone confirm if it is safe to continue and that it will ask my which drive to install to?

Also, once installed, do I get an automatic prompt as to which drive I want to boot from?

Thanks again in advance - nervous!:confused:

Duel Boot? Is that like Duelling Banjos, but with boots?

So, let me get this straight.

You have two drives you want to set up as a mirrored RAID array for backup purposes. Therefore only one drive will be visible, but you'll be writing to both at once.

You want to have two installations of XP on the same drive.

Mirrored RAID drives can't be partitioned, so you'd effectively have to install XP twice on the same drive. That's a reeeeeeeeaaaallly bad idea and will go tits up very quickly. You'd have to specify a different directory to install Windows to, but both installations would be looking for exactly the same files in exactly the same places, not to mention user profiles. Installing the same program to both Windows installations would be a nightmare.

I'd advise against it, mostly because it's hugely impractical.

Alternatively, as I probably read the OP wrong...

You just have two drives and want to install Windows on both, no RAID. It might work... You might need a different Boot loader, like GRUB?

You can always just use fixmbr to reset the boot record if the second installation doesn't work.

Hi - my first thought was to set up as RAID, but then I wondered about duel boot on the two drives - one drive as xp with MS office etc, and one with xp and games etc.

Is it possible to run xp on two drives so they can be configured differently? (Forget the RAID option at the moment).

Thanks.

Sorry to bump this but I really need to know IF it is possible to load xp on two drives on th same pc and then choose which one to boot with.

Any comments welcome - please.

Yes. I've done it as mentioned above, just instal XP onto both drives, then when booting up you can change the primary drive ((Ill just do it now))


you can select a primary drive to boot and a slave drive it will tell you what button to press you start up normally (f12, or shift and something)

Thats what I usualy do, and just switch from one to the other when I need to log on to the other dirve

All you'll need is a ribbon cable with two connectors. With IDE drives, you simply select which drive is the master and the slave (using the jumpers--there will be a legend on the drive, usually on the sticker on the front, sometimes silkscreened to the controller board). Once that is done, the motherboard/controller will recognize both drives.

Personally I'd go with using the native OS for gaming and use a virtualisation program such as VirtualBox to run the another OS and the other programs e.g. XP and Office. At work I use a Linux desktop and run Windows in a virtual machine and performance is great with VirtualBox. You can still use your RAID configuration then as well.

You can also take a snapshot of the VM once setup and if you mess anything up in the future just revert to that. Yes it's more work now but worth it afterwards...

Many thanks for the help m8s. I will be attempting this soon - if you don't hear from me it all went w........:huh:

I'll tell you what I'd do, no what I DO do, and use a 2nd partition as a Ghost partition. I have an extended partition formatted to around 100gb and just Ghost the entire C: drive to an image there, restores then take about 3 minutes with a 10GB system. You can easily do this with your 2nd drive.
Easy and no multi boot option to fanny about with.