ARRRRGGGH Swapping hds with different OS

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Raul_McCai

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I have a yen to run two different OS on the same mainboard by swapping hard drives out from bays

Sounds easy right?
Yah well not so.
There is a Boot manager issue that Win 7 gets into when I put a hard drive in that does not have Win 7 on it. I get a BLACK screen of death when I try to go back to Win 7 it tells me that due to some change there is an error and windows can't load.
I gotta insert my installation disk and go through the repair rigamarole.

Is there a way to work around this?
What is windows loading to my mainboard that stays resident and that I can't just plug the Win HD in and go after running another OS from a different HD? ?
 
Solution
Someone Somewhere
Ah. I haven't done much with EFI systems, but it's possible there's something there. I know there was something about it not liking you moving boot drives between SATA ports.

What happens if you have the Windows drive always on one port and Linux on another?
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ex_bubblehead

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My daily driver machine runs entirely off of swappable drives. The secret is to install each OS and all desired software entirely on one drive (the swappable one) only, making sure to disconnect all other media while installing. Share data between the systems via external storage.
 
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Raul_McCai

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Exactly the scenario I am trying to avoid.

I want to be able to have not a care in the world if I'm hacked or come home from the WWW with a wheelbarrow full of trojans viruses and worms because I can just insert a DOS disk ( with format loaded) in the CD burn the whole thing down reinstall the OS and start over.
I can't do that If I gotta have multiple OS on the same HD.





 
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USAFRet

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We are still entirely unsure of what you are trying to do.

2 different drives, each with its own OS. Fine. They also need the rest of the software.
One on the shelf, on in the PC.

The one in the PC dies, gets corrupted, whatever....Power down, unplug, put the other one in....boot.

You can't unplug a drive with a running OS, and plug in a new drive with a different OS, and expect it to work. It does not work like that.
 
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Raul_McCai

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That's what I said.

I want to run Ubuntu on one HD and use that for surfing dastardly places where monsters lurk, and the other is a Win 7 and that won't go where only lunatics boldly go on the web





Nothing like that.


However when I put any drive in my HD bay that is NOT the Win 7 drive, the system won't start correctly afterward when I'm putting the Win 7 drive back in. What happens is I get a black screen telling me that there is a some error offering hardware changes as a possible culprit. I can't get windows to load again unless I do a repair with my installation disk.
 
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ex_bubblehead

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However when I put any drive in my HD bay that is NOT the Win 7 drive, the system won't start correctly afterward when I'm putting the Win 7 drive back in. What happens is I get a black screen telling me that there is a some error offering hardware changes as a possible culprit. I can't get windows to load again unless I do a repair with my installation disk.
Click to expand...
Dollars to donuts you have a drive internal and that's where the Windows 7 boot manager resides. If you want to use swappable drives then each one must be a complete environment within itself. You have to install clean on each drive with all other media disconnected.
 
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Raul_McCai

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Dollars to donuts you have a drive internal and that's where the Windows 7 boot manager resides. If you want to use swappable drives then each one must be a complete environment within itself. You have to install clean on each drive with all other media disconnected.
Click to expand...

Looks like you ain't gettin a dollar or a doughnut. I have no internal drives it's all bays.
Besides The tower is open on my desk and I can see inside.

Boot from Windows, all works fine
Power down, swap drives, boot from the Linux drive, all works fine
Power down, replace the drive with with the Windows drive, does not work?
Click to expand...

Yup But it's goofier still: I can put a blank formatted drive in and that causes the same reaction when I put the Win 7 drive back in.

I am convinced that Win is storing something in a chip on the MOBO that talks to the MBR on the HD and when the alien MBR shows up it gets things all confused. Hence the error and the almost instantaneous "repair." It's repaired almost the instant I click on the Hyper link "Repair" in the OS install dialog box.





 
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ex_bubblehead

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Windows doesn't write any such thing to the motherboard. It's improper shutdown, a flaky hard drive, SATA cable, or a BIOS setting related to SATA.
 
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USAFRet

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No, it doesn't.
 
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Raul_McCai

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Oh but it is. It writes the system parameters to the CMOS.
There must be something written that requires the same OS.

I have done this with two Win 7 OS installations on two different HDs. The installation of win 7 on each HD was from the same installation CD using the Same Product Key. Of course Microsoft gave me three days to validate one of the installations, but for the experiment, it was sufficient.

The Machine booted just fine swapping the disks in and out ( after shut down).
 
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ex_bubblehead

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You are very sadly mistaken. Windows does not write anything to your CMOS, or anything else on your motherboard. Your problem lies elsewhere.
 
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Raul_McCai

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Sadly? VERY SADLY??? That's a bit melodramatic don't you think?
One would think I crashed a school bus full of adorable babies.


ROM then. Something is being written that sets the mainboard up to expect a certain OS.
There aren't many places on a main board where this can take place so that it retains the settings on power off.

I wonder what'll happen if I go through this exercise and remove the battery after shutdown.
 
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ex_bubblehead

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That's enough.




There are precisely zero places on your motherboard where this happens. You've been told more than once you need to be looking elsewhere.




You'll reapply all of your custom BIOS settings and be right back where you are now.
 
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USAFRet

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I have an old Dell laptop. 2 hard drives.

1 with Win 2000, 1 with PuppyLinux.
Boot, run one OS.
Power down
Swap drives
Boot to the other OS
Runs just fine in either direction.

I have another, much newer laptop:
Dual boot between Win 7 and Win 8.1 no problem

I have a different laptop:
Before the HDD died, it would dualboot between Windows Server 2008 and Linux with zero issues.

For my HTPC, I routinely boot from either the native OS on the HDD (Win 7), or a Linux LiveCD. Zero issues.

There is nothing 'written' to the motherboard that says what OS it should be expecting.
 
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Raul_McCai

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Other issues huh? I haven't seen any suggestions.

And of course there is the fact that Everything runs flawlessly otherwise. An unlikely scenario I should think if there is a failure anywhere.

The bootstrap loader in the ROM can take and retain data from the OS. I can't know what the engineers at ASUS nor what the engineers at Microsoft did (or didn't do) that might cause this. I do suspect that they probably did not design their systems with the idea that people would do as I am doing.

There are dual boot fans all over the place, (THIS IS NOT DUAL BOOT) but what I'm doing would not have had any popularity until the advent of bays as a common thing and still even with bays, most people don't use them for the OS. PC cases still have a slew of ports for fixed drives which is where the OS is usually installed.

So, I think I'm in defiance of marketing trends and marketing ( - - very sadly - - ) is what runs engineering departments.

Or stated another way: I think I'm trying to do something that wasn't ever contemplated by the designers and engineers.
Probably the Geeks and Eraser heads would have told me not to do this, because the very thing I'm trying to avoid might happen anyway VIA the potential of a PCI expansion ROM attack which would remain resident even while I swapped the contaminated HD out for a clean one thereby infecting all my drives.
So maybe I really need a second PC.
 
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Someone Somewhere

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Same here. My HTPC has been known to boot off Win7 on one drive, or XBMCbuntu on a completely different drive. No issues. Pull either drive, whichever OS is left will boot. Leave both, GRUB asks you what you want to boot.

EDIT: Didn't see your post above.

Are you running a UEFI or Legacy BIOS system?

I dual-boot in the way you're describing fairly frequently. Not daily, but I've done it before.

No serious way for a PCI ROM to do anything to your system, at least not without deliberate backdoors. Which is entirely possible of course, but you wouldn't exactly design stuff to try to prevent it.
 
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Raul_McCai

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What happens if you have the Windows drive always on one port and Linux on another?
Click to expand...

Well that would probably work just like a dual boot, but it also defeats the purpose.
I want to have a sacrificial hard drive for those embarrassing moments when I get hacked or pick up malware galore by surfing to places my mommy would spank me for. So if I have an OS on it's own discrete drive where I play on the web and on another I have my important stuff the result is that when I shut down to swap drives there is no transfer of the nasty crawlies I picked up on the web. My main drive can't get the crabs STDs HIV TB etc.

Now as for the poor hapless Ubuntu OS - - well - - it's unlikely to suffer much harm and won't even know I infected it by hanging around with cheap sleazy hookers and such.

See what I'm trying to do?
I think I will have to suffer the gross indignity of running a second system and swapping cables for mouse keyboard monitor etc. A/B switches wouldn't be much prettier.

I do have an asus m4a78 pro with an athalon phenom II and 8 gigs of corsair dominator and a PSU and a case and an optical drive even a couple of old school floppy drives all just sitting around with nobody to love any of it.

But I wanted the convenience of just swapping drives.
Call me spoiled.

What happens if you have the Windows drive always on one port and Linux on another?
Click to expand...

Oh - - - WAIT - - - You mean to not use the same physical bay?
Hmmmm~!!!
Gotta try that. Thks
 
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