2 Hard Drives with seperate OP systems

I use "BootIt NG" as a multi boot manager which will allow you to boot to as many OS as you want and to as many different partitions that you want to set up. I have 3 HDD with 5 seperate OS and all are bootable within their own right. With this set up if any drive fails then I can boot to any other drive and then repair the failed drive or remove it without having to repair the boot files as you would have to do using XP boot manager. What happens here is that a multiboot file is installed on the "lead In" of a drive and this hides all the master boot records of all the drives except the one that you are booting to. So in reallity all drives will boot as "C" drive and the others have named volumns along with letter designations. This way it is simple to know which drive is which. It works great and for almost 3 years now, I have never had an issue with it.
$35(us) but has a 30 day free (full) trial. Just be sure to read the "Read First" file as it has a rule about what partition manager you need to use for over 4 partitions. It also comes with some other great utillities, partition manager, back-up tool, ISO burner which I use regularly.
Check this option out over the xp boot manager before you get carried away.
 
For one you cannot have the same os on both hard drives and now to the formatting. Fisrst create a startup disk and set the bios to boot from Floppy. Then check what the new drive letters are and type: FORMAT X: (X is the drive letter) You may need to go into the bios and do a autodetect so it can detect your dives if you havent already as i dont know if it will do it automatically. then put the windows xp cd in(When you are still is dos) and type CD X: (again where x is the drive letter) and the type setup.exe. that should launch the windows xp setup. Try this and give me feed back.(if you havebnt already cured it)
 
if you install win xp on both drives you should be able to boot any of the drives from start up but which ever you shut down with it will boot back up on to change the boot for example c drive to d drive you have to press f8 at start up then select o/s i run 3 o/s win xp x2 on drive c and xp pro on d drive (slave)but i use hyperos to switch from one to the other from windows. but you can do all this without hyper as above.
Hope this helps

i run two of the same o/s as it helps keep my c: clean if i see a program i may like i will install on 2nd o/s then if i uninstall i have not left any unwanted files on c: so in other words the 2nd o/s is there for testing things and i have always got a clean o/s on c:
win xp can only handle upto around 50 pre selected programs and run without problems.so if your installing uninstalling all the time somthing is bound to go wrong. so my moto is keep a clean o/s.
 
Right so the 160Gb drive has windows on it, the 40gb doesn't?

This is the way i would do it.

I wouldn't format the 160gb drive since it already has windows on. So connect the 40gb drive as Master on the same IDE1 channel as the 160gb drive usually is. You can unplug the 160gb drive for this bit.

Put the windows disc in at bootup at set it up so that it installs on the 40gb drive. It will now format this, and install. (Make sure it does install on the 40gb)

After that has finished and you did want to format the 160gb drive too, install windows xp but select the 160gb drive to install it to by setting this as a Master, and you could take out the 40gb... (This might be the reason the boot loader isn't working though since its not setting one up)

Now it should boot up with a boot menu, and if it doesn't theres a way of setting this up:

Boot into windows on the 160gb one (The main using this as master and the 40gb as slave) and then go to the Control Panel, System, Advanced tab. Then under start up and recovery, click settings.
Press Edit to change the boot.ini.

This is how your should be set up, or something very much like this to get a boot loader. You can change the timeout to anything from 30 to 1 second. 0 doesn't work since you could just delete a drive from it to stop the boot process hehe

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="160gb" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="40gb /fastdetect

Basically it is set up so after 30 seconds, the default drive to load up is rdisk 0 (the 160gb drive), otherwise, you can choose between 140gb and 40gb. You can change these names to make it easier to know which one it is.

Partition 1 is always what windows is set up in at first, with rdisk 0 being the first IDE Master channel, and 1, 2, 3 with 3 drives for example.

So Save it, and restart after modifying. You should now have a boot up option.

I hope this helps :)
 
hehe, i just set mine to 30 to allow everyone to get onto the PC before it boots into mine :p

Though you can set it to 3... though that doesn't give you exactly enough time, does it?...
 
doesnt matter, i only use the first one anywayz, the second one is just there becuase it has my NTLDR, lol, and i use it to back up some stuff.
 
You could just take it out of the boot loader then really. Take the second option out so it wouldn't come up. You could then still acess it from windows anyways :p
 
Back
Top Bottom