How do I dual Boot a cloned Win 7 HDD?

[damohonda]

Hi,

I recently upgraded my harddrive as I needed the space and backed the old one up with macrium reflect then just copied everything to the new hard drive.

i was thinking, I might uninstall most of the programs on my old drive and tweak it for use with pro tools 10 so that it runs better.

My question is, if I do that, how do I install it into my comp so that both drives are bootable and I can select drive 1 for general use and drive 2 for pro tools? (Obviously avoiding any conflicts because they are more or less the same cloned drive?)

 

[spawnkiller]

I would disconnect the current running drive to format and install other things on the old HDD and then reconnect the new drive when all installation is complete...

I would then change the bios boot devices from HDD to another HDD depending on what you want to do (most motherboards have a shortcut like F8 to select rapidly boot devices without going into the complete bios)

You could also modify the boot manager to show another OS but it's more unsafe as it could potentially kill your access to windows if you corrupt this file (so make sure to copy and backup this file before doing any mods)

PS: sometimes OS comes with a dual-boot installation so it modify itself the boot.ini file and it creates a restore point in case of failure (Linux and Mac OSX can do that)