HOME & PRO on 2 different SATA drives ?

[mokaboy]

Hello,

I have installed ...

windows xp pro on SATA 1
and
windows xp home on SATA 2
(there is a reason for this)

anyway. there both sata drives as i said... how do i have a choice at startup to choose which operating system too choose?

I have them both installed and ready.

Please help

Mokaboy

 

[Sharkfood]

Hmmm.. you should simply be able to edit the boot.ini on the SATA/volume that automatically boots now.

Have a look at the examples on the MS page:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022

 

[Rik]

Or you could do it as i have! I have xp pro on 1 drive and vista on another!!
All i do is change the boot priority in my bios!!!!

 

[gbhall]

sort of puzzling how you got there...

Hmmm.. you should simply be able to edit the boot.ini on the SATA/volume that automatically boots now.

Have a look at the examples on the MS page:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022

It is a little surprising how you got two installs without Windows automatically giving you a boot up choice (via boot.ini as you have just learned).

I surmise you must have installed each OS by either having only one drive attached at a time, or by swapping them with changes to the primary/secondary jumpers. If I am right, then both OS are going to have all the stuff in the registry pointing to C:\...., yet when you choose one, the other would still be visible, as drive D:, and would probably not boot.

What you really need is a boot manager that allows you to completely hide the other drive. There are numerous commercial products to do this, but an excellent free one can be found by googling for 'GAG booter'. It is only small and although the interface might seem clumsy, it is actually very simple to use and highly effective.

This approach might not be satisfactory if you have data on both OS's that you want to access from the other, but my suspicion is that you would probably prefer to have these two OS's literally blind to each other.....

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

I surmise you must have installed each OS by either having only one drive attached at a time, or by swapping them with changes to the primary/secondary jumpers. If I am right, then both OS are going to have all the stuff in the registry pointing to C:\...., yet when you choose one, the other would still be visible, as drive D:, and would probably not boot.

If you change the hdd boot order in BIOS, the first drive becomes C:, as far as I know.

On the other hand, there's the thing with "active" partitions - changing the boot order in BIOS may have no effect (like on my PC).