Setting up a complciated dual boot system

[FynexFox]

Hello everyone, I am new here, and I have a few questions pertaining to a dual boot. If I have two ahrd drvies, The primary has windows xp and the slave ahs osx. I want it so when I press the turn on button I get a screen that asks to start in windows xp or osx. catch is I dont want the ahrd drvies to eb able to communicate, if im in osx everything goes and comes from that hd, same when im in windows xp. How would i go about setting this up?

 

[BiZ]

Its not possible unless you use a emulator such like virtual pc. Easiest way and its free would be to install a linux distro and set up the bootloader for windows mac and linux.

 

[BiZ]

Actually i believe you could install GRUB to HDA through "linux rescue" off disc 1 without actually installing linux. I'm not sure if you would be able to edit the grub.conf though in windows or mac.

 

[patio]

Unfortunately if Windows is giving you this option the 2 OS's are not truly seperate or you wouldn't see a choice menu...This tells me that OSX was installed after WinXP and that some of the files needed to boot OSX are in the boot sector of C:.
Does your BIOS support switching boot drives on startup? ?
This is the cleanest way to do it along with using a boot manager as suggested above.
You would need to reinstall XP to get rid of references to the other OS.
Then usinfg the HDD boot option in the BIOS switch to the 2nd HDD and reinstall OSX.
Afterwards when you boot to drive #1 it will only see WinXP and conversely when you boot to drive #2 it will only see OSX...

patio.

 

[Samstoned]

acronis writes an boot manager but not so sure bout the hide drive from other system thing
you would need to go into each OS and config it to hide the other drive
Acronis
just checked the new version does hide OS