New Hard Drive question...

Hey all...

just wanted to get general consensus on something.....

I am currently running a 60gb drive with 3 profiles on it - 1 of which is mine, 2 of which are for other people in the household who dont really care too much about performance and security etc...

ok - so to avoid the angry admin role... haha - i got a new 200gb drive for myself which i want to have on the same machine - BUT, with my OWN installation of the XP HOME.... i have the software - but is this possible?

can i have 2 hard drives - loaded with the same OS, but be totally separate entities? - I would like to have essentially, my own system on the 200gb - without having to share space and problems with the other 60gb thats currently in the system....

opinions / suggestions please!!!

thanks guys!!

 

I saw a post where someone did have two different versions of XP (Pro and Home) and Linux all on the same hard drive in different partitions.

You could probably have two different drives with different XP os's on them. I have used a key switch in the past to change two different drive's master/slave configuration so that I could have two operating systems (Linux or Windows) on different drives and boot to the one I wanted. I have used that key switch with two Win98 os's but you have to be careful that one isn't trashed when installing the other (something I have done more than once). That key switch is called a nik-lock I think. There might be better solutions available though. The nice thing about the key switch is that you can keep the key and your drive is somewhat safe from the other users. I originally installed the switch so that I could have a Linux box while not having to make others use a boot manager.

Do a search for boot manager or something like that and look at Newegg and see what they have.

 

ok - but did you get what i was asking.....

i want 2 os's (both xp home) installed on 2 different hard drives - and have the choice of which to run/boot to...

this way - without having to get a whole new machine, i can simply have my OWN whole HD in the same system without affecting the current HD

 

Yes I know what you are saying. Using a switch to make one drive the master and the other the slave (and consequently reversing that via the key switch) will make the os and drive YOU want boot up.

Here is the link to a review of the switch I have. I don't know if you can still buy one or not but it could be made at home.
http://www.dansdata.com/nicklock.htm

I used it to boot two different drives, each with it's own Win98se on it.

 

ah - theres no option to do this where i dont need additional hardware?

i was thinking just altering the boot.ini to give me the option of which one to boot - that wouldnt work?

 

I'll bet you can but that is something I have never tried. I would probably mess things up a few times before I got it right. Here is a fairly decent boot.ini article at Microsoft if you want to check it out:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=289022

Maybe just using a software boot manager (a free one) will do what you want.

 

Here is an interesting link:
http://www.osloader.com/

 

man - this is becoming way more complicated than i wanted - lol

all i want is an eazy way to have my OWN OS Install so i dont have to share on profiles and newb users riddling the thing with dumb stuff - haha

 

this just might work!

thanks Stardis!