Dual Boot?

I have 3 hard drives 80 gig, 60 gig, 40 gig. the 80 and 60 gig Has Windows Xp Pro installed on both of them. I would like to select which hard drive to boot from. My reason being the 60 gig has a lot of engineering programs which i don't use regular, the 80 gig has a fresh version of windows xp pro. I know i have to change the MBR/ boot parameters but i don't know exactly what i have to change.
Thanks.

 

I'm tripple bootin. XP Home, Pro and Server 2003 (trial). You don't need seperate hard drives just seperate partitions for each OS. System Properties, Advanced Tab and via Startup and Recovery.... allows you to see/edit the boot.ini and adjust the settings which enable you to choose which OS to boot too. I set mine to allow me 10 seconds to make a choice or it will boot to XP Home by default.

 

The thing is the 60 gig only has 10gig free and i want to keep that incase i have to save any files in the engineering programs.

 

Maybe try editing the boot.ini file. Right click my computer/properties/advanced/startup & recovery/edit. Make sure you know what you are doing though.

 

Dude i posted here because i needed help. I dont know what i am doing.

 

How does your system boot now? How do you select between the two versions of XP Pro? This may help with what we are trying to explain... http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=289022

 

whould it matter if the os's are on different hard disks

 

Maybe i am getting ahead of my self. Where should the pins be on the hard drives. master, slave, cs, etc

 

Not an expert on this but maybe set the harddrive that you want to primarily boot to, as Master. Set the others as slaves. Real experts, please step in. Bazza

 

I had assumed the HDD was already installed. Now the Hard Drive you are trying to set up may not even boot in your machine if it wasn't loaded in that PC to begin with.

Master / Primary Drive goes on the End. Secondary / Slave in the middle. Check the Drives for the approaite jumper settings of each. The can both be set to Cable Select or identified Drive as Primary and Slave via jumpers.

I really don't know how this is going to work since you are not actually installing the second OS. I'd make a boot disk and be prepared to have to edit the boot.ini