Dual booting two different hard drive

[techfreack]

i have two different hard drive one is 150gb which had xp home edition and in newly attached hard drive i put xp proffesional. now the problem is when i start the computer it should give me boot option;however it doesn't and boots directly windows xp pro.

i can view other drives from this harddrive. help needed. xp home was already installed in master 150gb, i put xp pro in slave drive which is 40 gb!

 

[strategic]

You can only boot from 1 hdd.Both o/s would need to be on the same hdd Why would you need both XP, and XP pro? If you have Pro, it will do anything Home can do.

 

[SNGX1275]

You can only boot from 1 partition at once. But that doesn't limit itself to only 1 drive (can't boot both drives at once either though). But you can boot from either.

You need to edit your boot.ini in whatever OS yours is defaulting to, apparently XP Pro. It boots XP pro because that is the last one to modify your MBR.

You should probably backup your boot.ini before screwing with it.

Yours probably looks like this now:

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP" /fastdetect

My guess is it needs to look like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

Don't just copy paste that though because I'm just guessing based on what you said. You'll want to read and make sure you understand what is said in this link before proceeding.