Dual boot physically separate HDD

[jheavner]

I installed Win 7 on an old 100 GB SATA HDD I had laying around. Now I have my old XP SATA HDD and the new Win 7 SATA HDD and I'd like to be able to choose which OS I boot to. Currently I have to switch SATA cables to the MB to change which drive boots (which is painful). I don't know anything about the new Win 7 boot manager and I really don't want to change anything on my XP drive. I just want to add XP to the Win 7 boot manager. Any ideas?

 

[MayDay94]

i dual boot xp and vista64 on separate drives. if my memory serves me correctly, you need to install the new os (win7 in this case) with the xp drive setup already. my vista cd recognized xp and asked if i wanted to remove it, upgrade it to vista, or dual boot it. it works great. i don't have win7 but i believe it works the same.

 

[daship]

Tab f8 when booting, choose the drive you want from the list.

 

[jheavner]

Tab f8 when booting, choose the drive you want from the list.

Ha, you know...it should have occurred to me to try that. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.

 

[megamanx00]

It's best to have windows XP on the primary boot driver. It has a fit if it's not on the primary partition, and while you can get it to work just fine if it's not on what's considered the "C:\" drive all the poorly coded programs that just automatically put files on the drive labeled "C:" would be writing to that win7 drive.

 

[RetiredChief]

megamanx00
Should not be a problem. I am setup to boot to Vista, or winXP, by hitting F12 during boot. If I select Vista, then the drive that Vista is on comes up as "C:" XP comes up as E: If I select XP, then the Drive that XP is on comes up as C:\ and Vista comes up as Drive D.

It also rearranges other drive letters. I have drive letters set for botting Vista. C & D for drive 0 and Drives E (XP), F, & G for Drive 1. When I boot XP Drive 1 E changes to C: and Vista becomes D: and other dive letters change. Current operating system always comes up as C: When You install on seperate drives one at a time, Unless you change it. (not sure you can.)

Throw back First primary partition = C, 2nd Primary partition = D (on 2nd drive). if drive 0 has a extended partition it started with E: Once setup you can go into Windows/Vista and change drive lettes, except boot partition.

My system 4 HDDs, two pair of raid0.