Dual boot on 2 hard drives?

I have vista installed on one of my hard drives and i just bought and installed another hard drive and i installed XP pro onto it and i was wondering what i have to change in my boot.ini for it to come up and give me the option to boot from one or the other. Both are SATA drives. is it even possible?

 

You can set up the dual boot a couple of ways; modify the boot.ini file, or, use a third party boot manager (like OSL for example). Here's a link to some info from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022/en-us You'd be changing the disk and/or partition numbers in the last line(s) of the boot.ini file (see below). Here's an example dual boot setup (from Microsoft) :

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

I hope this info helps more than confuses the situation. Personally, I think a third party boot manager is a better way to go.... Good Luck!!! You can find several free boot managers in the Drive Utilites section here at MajorGeeks. I've used OSL2000 in the past with great results (it's been awhile so I don't really remember how to configure it, but I obviously figured it out ). Here's a link to OSL2000: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download2165.html

hd2k

 

Another possibility, one I use, is to have removable hard drive bays. They are not hot swapable, but they will allow you to have two independent OSs with no fuss or muss, and if one dies, the other one is a backup.