Dual Booting From Two Hard Drives?

I have two 320gig hard drives. One is connected to Sata Port 1. The other is connected to Sata Port 2.

The drive on Sata 1 is the one I installed Windows XP on. Then when I connected the second drive to Sata 2, when Windows booted up it detected it and installed it as a slave drive.

NOW, here is the question:

I'd like to take the drive on Sata 2, total wipe it by deleting the partition, then install Windows Vista on there by creating/formating a new partition with my Vista installation disc.

The question is, will I still be able to dual boot from two separate hard drives on two different Sata ports? I was under the impression that dual booting can only work when dealing with different partitions on the same drive.

NOTE: I basically need to have the option of choosing at start up between my Sata 1 drive with Windows XP and my Sata 2 drive with Windows Vista.

 

Well, if you want to keep the drives separate, so you specifically boot off of each one individually, you probably want to disconnect the XP drive when you install Vista. It will work fine. Of course, you could keep both drives up, and let Vista install a bootloader onto the first drive and choose them from one boot menu. Either way, it should be fine. You should note that your second SATA drive is not a slave. Both are master drives.

 

Question:

So, lets say I have Drive A: (320gig, 7200RPM, OS: Windows XP) connected to the SATA 1 port and Drive B: (320gig, 7200RPM, OS: Windows Vista) connected to the SATA 2 port.

During start up will I be given the option to choose which drive (and thus which OS) to boot before either one loads?

 

If you have installed XP first, yes.

When you go to install Vista on the second drive, it will setup a bootloader on the first drive to include a menu to choose BOTH operating systems.

 

I run a dual-boot XP/Vista setup in exactly that way - dual SATA's. The mobo is an ASUS which also has 2 IDE's, so I share a common data drive for both OS's.

The Vista bootloader will default to boot it as the primary OS - the XP installation will show up as "Earlier Version of Windows", instead of Windows 2000, Windows 98, etc as earlier dual-boots did. The default wait time is 30 seconds - plenty to switch to XP. The boot.ini file is easily edited in Notepad to change the default timing to shorter or longer.

 

I see. I've never did this before so at what point during my initial boot up will I be given the option to choose between which drive/OS I wanted to load?

 

After the bios starts the machine, the first screen that opens will be the bootloader. When you click on the OS you want to use, then the usual spash sceen starts, and the OS loads normally. You can not switch between them this way - you have to log off and reboot.

If you were running one OS in Virtual Machine, or VMWare, you can switch just by changing windows on the screen. However, that is an option for a different thread discussion.

 

...you don't click. There is no mouse support


You use the arrow keys, highlight what you want and hit Enter.

 

I installed Vista on the new drive. It booted several times during the installation on the new drive set up on SATA 2. Then once the installation was done I shut down the PC. Now it just loads back to my fist drive (SATA 1) that is installed with Windows XP.

During start up I see no screen with the option to choose an OS. I do not think a boot loader was installed for some reason.

 

Do you have some sort of boot protection enabled in the BIOS? That would do it.

 

I checked the BIOS and I see no such setting for any kind of protection.

I did however notice something else:

1) It turns out that Drive 1 (Windows XP) is connected to SATA port 1 and Drive 2 (newly installed Windows Vista) is set up on SATA port 3. Would this make a difference in setting up a boot loader?

2) Also, I have my SATA RAID Controller option in my BIOS disabled as I do not have a RAID setup in my PC and Windows always asks for the drivers otherwise. So I keep that disabled. Would that effect the boot loader set up?