Hi.
I'm needing to make some changes and hope it can be done without too much tech knowledge required.
I run XP Pro w/SP3.
I have 2 almost new 640g hard drives.
I know how to install the os, drivers etc but I need to be able to have each hard drive with the fully updated os in the same pc. Each hard drive would have different programs, such as security, Office, music, etc..
They need to be kept separate for business reasons.
How can I do this?
Thanks.
jst42day

This post has been edited by jst42day: Oct 6 2008, 05:28 AM

Any help, please?

Take a look at this...
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic9371.html

The only problem I see with doing this is the fact your master boot record has to be on one drive and one drive only. So if that drive dies, both os's won't boot anyways (doesn't mean you can't get your files off). One master boot record whether it is for XP or Linux controls the boot options and available os's upon the drives. But only 1 boot record does that, you can't have 2. That is to say it is possible you can do this.

As for dual booting 2 copies of xp... I think that is possible also.

If I were you though I would do it like this.

Hard drive #1
Split into 2 partitions.
Windows XP for Home use
Windows XP for Work use

Hard drive #2
Split into 2 partitions and use as backup each partition for 1 of the windows installations (so keep all your main files on the main drive and just use this drive as the backup).

Or

Hard drive #2
Split into 2 partitions, put all your files on those partitions, then get an external drive to back that up.


Fact is you don't need a 640 GB hard drive for an XP installation alone, much less 2 installs as each will only take up about 2-3gb.


If you want to do it your way which is 1 XP install on each of the 640GB hard drives, I recommend regardless making a second partition on each as a backup... Unless you are seriously going to use all those GB (in which case you seriously need to invest in a greater than 1TB external storage unit).

With option 1 are you saying that I can take one hard drive and split it into partitions and install XP operating system on 2 of the partitions.
That I could easily do.
But how would I be able to specify which partition I wanted to use at an given time?
Thanks.
jst42day

This post has been edited by jst42day: Oct 6 2008, 09:13 AM

If you install a dual boot with any OS. It will always have a menu at boot time which allows you to choose which installation you want to boot.

Like this for example
http://z.askapache.com/uploads/2007/08/boo...ery-console.png

But instead of 1 Windows choice, you would see 2. You would have to remember which of those 2 is the home and which is work...

With any dual boot you can only be logged into one OS at a time. At boot your computer will be aware of 2 possible OS's to boot to and it will ask you which you would like to choose.

In fact you can do everything you need to accomplish this with just an XP CD. As the xp cd can create partitions and install to them.

AitrusSkyy,
Thanks for your help.
What you gave me is great and easy.
jst42day

TIP

once the 2 os are on edit the boot.ini file to rename the system names

and the time to display the list of operating systems at startup

only change the text between " "



example 2 partitions with xp on differant partitions

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP home" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP work" /fastdetect

ps
backup the boot.ini file first

Good idea