Dual Booting w/ 2 HDs - XP pro on both

[dmccaulley]

Hello. Recently I picked up my first ipod and in order to use the ipod I needed to install SP2. After upgrading to SP2 I ran into all sorts of problems, I fixed most of them however my digital camera just doesnt want to work under SP2. I have 2 hard drives and I want to setup a dual boot system so I can take care of everything. Here is a quick breakdown of my setup:

I have 2 hard drives, a Serial ATA 80gig & an Ultra ATA 160gig.

I need both SP1 & SP2 so here is what I want to do.

Since I only need SP2 for my ipod I want to install it on my serial ata 80gig drive along with itunes, the ipod drivers and all of my music.

I need SP1 running on my Ultra ATA 160gig drive, and I am going to install everything else on there.

I dont know much about dual booting so I have a few questions. Right now I am running the 160gig and the 80gig togeather, the 80gig still has windows XP installed with SP1, and its acting as a slave drive. The 160 has SP2 and is running as the master. Now I know that you have to set the jumper to configure the drive as a master/slave but here is an off topic question. the serial ata doesnt have jumpers so I cant set it to be a slave, and all i did was remove the jumper from my ultra ata 160gig and hook them both up and boot up. The system just detects the 160 gig as the master, as it is running the OS from its hard drive. Am I setting this up right, or should i have something set differently to run a master/slave setup for a UATA and a SATA drive?

With dual booting will I be setting it up like a master/slave setup or what? Right now with the current setup I can access all my music off the 80gig drive from the software on the 160 gig drive... will I be able to do that with a dual boot setup?

my main question is simply how do I do this?

thanks so much for any help you can give me.

 

[luvr]

the serial ata doesnt have jumpers so I cant set it to be a slave

That's correct - Serial ATA has just one device per cable, so it doesn't use the master vs. slave concept. "Master" and "Slave" refer to two disks on one IDE (a.k.a. ATA) cable.

The system just detects the 160 gig as the master, as it is running the OS from its hard drive.

More accurately, the 160-GB disk is what the BIOS sees as the first one - which is why that's the disk it will boot from.
If you want to boot from the other disk, you will have to go into the BIOS, and see if you can rearrange the order in which they appear. If you can configure the Serial ATA disk as the first one, and providing that your BIOS can boot from a S-ATA disk, your computer will subsequently boot from it.

Unfortunately, Windows can only boot from the first disk in the system, so you will have to reconfigure your BIOS whenever you want to switch between the two. Alternatively, you can install a boot manager that supports temporarily swapping the disk order in software, so as to make the Windows boot sequence believe that it's sitting on the first disk (even if it's actually on the second disk according to the BIOS configuration). My own personal favourite boot manager is GRUB, which supports this feature perfectly; however, in order to install GRUB, you will need Linux (which you can run straight off a LiveCD, if you don't want to install it on your harddisk).