DVD-Software.info

[pil]

I have a PC with two 200gb serial ata HD's. My motherboard also supports
raid. I would like to install windows XP on both HD's so that two people can
use the PC with their own settings.

The problem is that I will be changing my hard drive partitions all the time
and therefore bootmagic (from partition magic) will not be appropriate
because creating and removing partitions with OS's on it will affect the
other XP installation. I want the PC to act as two seperate PC's.

Is there any way to physically switch between harddrives without having to
unplug and swop all the time? In the past disabling one in the bios worked
fine but nowadays windows xp can pick the HD up even when disables in the
bios.

Please help.

[Fakename]

You could get a hard drive caddy. You would still have to switch trays,
but you wouldn't have to open the case and mess with the internals each
time you wanted to switch installs.

[pil]

yeah thats a good idea.

How about putting the two 200gigabytes on the raid and then get a 1 gb drive
on the sata (or ata) which only runs boot magic?

[Alan Shepherd]

Simple answer - Install Windows XP onto drive C as normal, but leave a
second partition, on one or the other drive, set as primary, and Install a
second copy onto that partition, then when windows boots up it offers two
windows installations to run, without the problems of changing drives, or
using a partition manager.

[Sjouke Burry]

What i did at work and home, was to connect a switch to the master/slave
selection of the harddisks.
in one case, it was switch and reboot, in the other case the computer
had to be switched off,to recognize the master/slave switch.

In both cases the harddisks needed one strap to open or close for master
or slave.

Dont setup the disks while they are both in the system,because setup
(WIN98 an XP)will scan them both and complain or damage the setup on
the other one.In my case,it removed essential files from the DOS6.22
installation on the other disk,replacing them with silly bachfiles
telling me to do it in windows.
You might have problems with ativating windows twice.

Regards,S burry

[Fakename]

I tried something like that once and it didn't work for me. If the
windows install routine finds an existing windows install it won't allow
you to install another windows to another partition, if I remember
correctly.

[Bill Vermillion]

Well you will have to poweroff - but I used to run from two
different drives - MS on one - and Unix on another.

I had removeable trays - and these were SCSI - and they had locks
on the trays that also turned the power on/off to the tray. So
when I wanted to go to the OS on the second drive, I'd power down,
turn the key on the first drive off and reboot.

The BIOS takes the first drive it sees as the primary - so the
second drive was now primary.

The only caveat on that for some OSes is that the OS knows the
the SCSI ID on which it was installed, so while it defaulted to
ID 0, on install you had to tell it ID 1.

This concept should work fine on IDE units - but I havent seen any
with power switches. That's why on my test system I have 5 trays
and can boot whatever I put in. Two types of Linux. One SCO.
An MS - and I forget what the other as as I've taken BeOS off.

Bill

--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com

[Bill Vermillion]