[SOLVED] Two bootable SATA HDs in Windows XP

[king1769]

I'm having some issues on an old Dell Inspiron 530 Windows XP. (I know it's old ,etc but has a lot of stuff that I'd hate to buy/reload. Used in church, taxes and tract Ministry).

I was wanting to clone the current 500G hard to another 500G HD i already have in the PC using Acronis 2009. I was wanting to just leave the cloned bootable hard drive in the PC and reclone every month or so. That way if the current drive fails, I just simply switch to the cloned drive.
But I just heard on a youtube video you can not have two bootable hard drives in the same PC. One will become unbootable.
How does it know which one to boot from with a SATA drive? From the bios setup?
Thanks

 

[USAFRet]

You can, but that is not optimal.
In your scenario, if the system were to be hit with a virus, both drives and all the data are vulnerable.

A much better solution is a set of Images, on a drive that is not always connected.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html

And you really, really shouldn't be using XP on anything that is connected to the outside world.