Two PCs in one - is it possible?

Say you had a beautiful new pc equipped with all the best hardware.
And say that it's principal purpose was business and you were determined to be scrupulously careful about maintaining it's good function...no bloatware, no careless surfing, no dodgy downloads etc.
But say you also wanted to use the same pc at weekends and you knew you'd never be as careful despite all your best intentions.

Would it be possible to have effectively two PCs in the same box? For example what about 2 harddrives, each with it's own OS , and a dual boot set up in bios to choose between the two? On Monday to Friday you could choose the "serious" OS on one drive, and do all your work in that drive - super carefully. At weekends you'd choose the "leisure" OS on the other drive and risk all your more reckless stuff there.

If so, how would you stop the potential for "cross-contamination" - for want of a better word - between the two drives. Whichever drive/OS you were using, you'd want the other one to be inaccessible at that time.

Any ideas?

 

Absolutely possible, just the way you mentioned: 2 hard drives, each with it's own OS, and a boot manager to allow you to boot to the drive of your choice. It shouldn't be all that difficult. The way I'd do it is to install the OS on one drive at a time, without the other drive hooked up. And I'd have each HD on it's own channel as a master, and use the boot manager to pick IDE0 or IDE1 to boot to. To prevent 'cross contamination' simply disable the other hard drive in each OS: on IDE0's OS, disable the HD on IDE1, and vice versa. If you decide to do this, let us know how you proceed, what boot manger you decide to use, etc. Sounds like an interesting project... GOOD LUCK!

hopperdave2000

BTW- you can find some boot managers here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads8.html
A few are free (GAG for example).

 

yeah you can, either partition the disk into two partitions and then install the os of your choice on each of the partitions, or just add a new disk and install both oses on each, that would mean setting up a dual boot, and then after the bios has done its checks you'd be given the choice which one to boot from, as for the cross contamination thing, thats not going to happen, when your booted into one os, the other one doesnt exist, and viceversa, so dont worry about ruining your work! as always remember to back up your data regularly! :major i-CONICA :major

 

Great! This will be sometime down the line but it's encouraging to know it's do-able. Many thanks for the replies.