Using 2 HDD's with one being detected.

[HaakonXCI]

Hi, I'm new to multiple harddrives and I'm really clueless as to how this would be managed before I end up messing something up here. I have 2 SATA harddrives and I would like to plug in both but I'm going to have one have Windows Vista on it and another with Ubuntu and I would like to know how to make it so the other drive is not detected whatsoever in either OS. I'm kinda lazy which is why I ask so this way I can just have both drives plugged in without me switching out the cables for each boot.

Any way to make this work without RAID or anything fancy?

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi there,

Need to tell the group more about your computer, model, Desktop of Laptop, CPU, attached devices, OS, RAM etc. That way everyone can think about the same problem and come up with the best solution for you.

One HDD has to be the Active Drive, designated as System and Boot. Is that your Vista HDD designated as C:\? And is that drive in Disk Management listed as Disk 0, Basic, and Volume listed as NTFS, with the drive designation as C, and Healthy?

If so, the probably the easiest way to Multiboot to either Vista or Ubuntu, is to use the Free Boot Manager EasyBCD, which will find the separate OS's on separate Basic discs, and list them in the Boot Menu to choose from. It will handle the Win-XP ntldr, Vista or Win-7 Winload, or Unix Ubuntu.

It takes the component place of the Boot Manager Phase in the StartUp phases of your computer startup phases.

It has nothing to do with Dynamic Drives using RAID, Spanning, or Mirroring.
It lets you easiy choose which OS to boot to when your computer starts up without having to edit the BCD store or programmatically change the names or order of the multiple OS's on the computer.

 

[HaakonXCI]

My computer is one I put together a few years ago but changes have been made since. Here is what's currently in the PC..

Case: Apevia X-Jupiter G Black (Full Tower)
CPU: Intel Q6600 @ 2.4ghz (aftermarket cooler)
RAM: 4GB Corsair DDR2 800mhz
GPU: MSI GTX 460 Hawk (1GB)
PSU: Rosewill Xtreme 750w
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit

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Devices:

Logitech G15 keyboard
Razer Deathadder mouse
Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers

--

This 1TB drive is my Vista drive and would like it to be completely separated without any presence from the other HDD whilst in Ubuntu and vice-versa so it won't show up as a removable drive or something. The vista drive is installed in the C:\ partition.

The HDD listed in the Disk Manager is listed as Disk 0 (System, Boot, PageFile, Active, Crash Dump and Primary Partition.) I don't have the 2nd HDD plugged in yet and don't plan to though until this is all sorted out. So basically all I have to do is unplug my 1TB drive, plug in the 320gb drive in a slot like sata1/2, format it and install Ubuntu, plug the 1TB drive back into sata 0, boot into vista, install the BCD program, run that and configure it, restart the PC and I can load into Ubuntu without having the 1TB drive show up at all?

Or.. Is it possible to have it load into Ubuntu but have it so the 1TB is shown but has read/write restrictions so there's no data corruption or overwrites?

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi there,

This can get technincal, but there essentially 6 phases in the StartUp process of a computer. The first two are System Initialization and System Setup which are system independent, where you go into the BIOS and set the HDD boot order, enabled hard drivers, config the settings etc.

Then there is a phase called Boot Manager. If you have just 1 OS, you don't have a choice, if you have 2 or more OS in different partitions or different physical drives, you can have a choice where a Boot Menu is presented 15-30 seconds and you choose which OS you want to boot up.

Next comes the Boot Loader, where the OS you chose loads into RAM and begins.

So you can alter the Boot Manager Phase to choose the OS's you have available, and in which order you would like them to be. The first in order is the default one, if you do nothing, that one gets chosen.

You can edit the MBR and BCD yourself to make this work (very advanced) or you can have a small appl intercept this phase and let you set it up the way you want, from a GUI shell. Two programs that do this are free, EasyBCD and VistaBootPro. Usually you click on the Space Bar or F2 to bring up he Boot Menu just after the Splash Screen closes.

Take a look at Easy BCD, and give it a try. It scans your physical disks, lists the OS's you have, and gives you a Boot Menu choice to click one the one you want. This is called MultiBooting, or with just two, DualBooting.
When you choose, say Ubuntu, Vista doesn't open or interfere. When you shut down your computer, next time you boot up, you get the choice of which OS to boot into.

I think this is what you are looking for, and hope it helps