Can one HDD be accessed by two motherboards if accessed at different times?

[red21osiris]

Here's an imaginary situation...

For curiosities sake, two independent motherboards are present in a case, installed in such a way that only one could be on at a time. Let's say that one motherboard is an intel chip with hardware configured to run windows 7 and let's say that the other is an apple motherboard configured for OS X Lion. And there is a three way switch on the case giving power to only one board at a time.

If the motherboards were both run to one hard drive, could both motherboards access the hard drive and function normally so long only one of them was on at a time?

I am assuming that they would be able to, the board set up for windows would search the drive for its partition and read and write to it, and the board set up for mac would search for its partition and read and write to it.



And before things get nuts, yes, I know that you don't need to do this and that you can dual boot mac/windows blah blah blah. I am just curious as to whether or not it is possible.

If you have to know why I ask, I am considering a mod to put an xbox1 mobo and a ps2slim mobo into an xbox1 case, in with a micro atx psu and a 2.5 hdd. the case mod being a homage to phantom crash and slai, the setup would only run these two games off the hdd.

 

[Lokalaskurar]

In theory, if the power to the HDD also switches to the corresponding motherboard, yeah it should be possible. (see EDIT below)

But this switching-idea must also be applied to the data cable running to the HDD. The cable must not be connected to both motherboards at the same time, that would cause internal confusion.

But in theory, a multi-port power switch could do the job, sure.

EDIT:
Keep in mind, for your splendid idea: you need (at least) two separate partitions on the HDD, one formatted in FATX, and one formatted in (whatever format the PS2 uses). It is possible to format two different partitions on a drive in different formats, but it is tricky.