2 hard drives. 2 OS's Jeff 7/3/2007 1:10:06 PM One has xp pro and the other has Vista home premium. I want to be able to have the option of using both hard drive's at the same time. As it is now, I swap the hard drive in that I want to use and then swap it out for when i need to go back to XP. Is there a way I can leave them both plugged in and have an option on reboot to chose what OS I want? Thanks.

Re: 2 hard drives. 2 OS's "Richard Urban" <richardurbanREMOVETHIS[ at ]hotmail.com> 7/3/2007 1:32:58 PM You presently have each operating system on it's own hard drive. That means that the boot code necessary for each operating system is on it's respective drive. That is good. What you now need is a third party boot manager (I have been using System Commander from http://www.v-com.com/product/System_Commander_Home.html). When installed, it will detect each O/S and place an option in the initial boot screen to allow you to choose which one to boot into. My feeling is that each operating system *should* be hidden from the other. This way, if your copy of Windows XP becomes infected the infection will not pass to Vista. There is an option in System Commander to allow you to hide the system that you are *NOT* using. If you just want a common area that is accessible to both operating systems I would suggest that you create a new "logical partition on your largest hard drive. You will have to shrink the partition that is currently there to free up space. You can do this with Acronis Disk Director from www.acronis.com. Then you would create a new partition in the unallocated space. This partition would be visible/usable from both operating systems. While there I would heartily recommend that you also get TrueImage HOME to image your system partitions. The images can be stored on DVD, an external USB hard drive or on the partition that you just created - space allowing. You also have to physically set the hard drives in your computer as master/slave if they are both connected to the same IDE channel. If each drive is connected to a different IDE cable you would set them both as master. If your computer has SATA drives each drive is already on it's own channel and there are no master/slave settings. -- Regards, Richard Urban Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User (For email, remove the obvious from my address) "Jeff" <Jeff[ at ]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:E35AE714-9EE6-454A-A8DF-D715FC7D6E94[ at ]microsoft.com... [Quoted Text] > One has xp pro and the other has Vista home premium. I want to be able to > have the option of using both hard drive's at the same time. As it is now, > I > swap the hard drive in that I want to use and then swap it out for when i > need to go back to XP. Is there a way I can leave them both plugged in and > have an option on reboot to chose what OS I want? > > Thanks.

Re: 2 hard drives. 2 OS's "...winston" <merlin[ at ]druid9#.com> 7/4/2007 6:43:57 PM Assuming you plan on installing the second drive in the slave position, in addition to Richard's advice on System Commander(a fine program) other options would be using an optional program installed in XP or Vista(install it in the o/s that boots from the primary drive when both drives are connected. Optional programs for setting up a dual boot system. EasyBCD http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1 VistaBootPro http://www.vistabootpro.org/index.php BootItNg http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html The first two are free programs. Before proceeding with any of the above..read this article about required files, sequence to follow,etc http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=84455 Good Luck. ..winston "Jeff" <Jeff[ at ]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:E35AE714-9EE6-454A-A8DF-D715FC7D6E94[ at ]microsoft.com... : One has xp pro and the other has Vista home premium. I want to be able to : have the option of using both hard drive's at the same time. As it is now, I : swap the hard drive in that I want to use and then swap it out for when i : need to go back to XP. Is there a way I can leave them both plugged in and : have an option on reboot to chose what OS I want? : : Thanks.