Urgent Help Required Dual Boot XP 2 Drives

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Hello to everybody, just need some advice please, I wish to duel boot XP Pro using 2 seperate HDD.

Q. Do both drives have to be master (D1= Pri Master) (D2= Sec Master) with
CDRW= (Pri Slave) or (Sec Slave)

or

(D1= Pri Master) (D2= Pri Slave) with CDRW = (Sec Master)


Thank You in Advance

Glen
 
You can find many boot managers on the web, some free such as GAG booter. In almost all cases, you can swap the boot drive in the boot manager and hide the other drive (and / or windows OS on the other drive.) In my experience this often, but not always works. In the cases where it does not work, it is necessary to alter the boot order of the drives in the bios before each alternation of the two systems. This typically is where one drive is SATA and the other is IDE.

In neither case mentioned above (software change or bios change of booting drive), is there any need to worry about master and slave settings.

One pitfall to avoid is having the first-installed windows system 'visible' when installing the second. That way, you will likely run into various strange problems like finding your 2nd copy installing itself as drive X: where X: can be almost anything. In short, before installing the second copy, be sure to run FDISK or a similar partition manager such as gparted, to mark the first install as 'hidden'. The boot manager you decide to use will do the job of unhiding it to use it when required.
 
No need to put 'urgent' in your subject. I almost didn't read this thread for that reason. If its urgent go pay someone to help you.

You also are misunderstanding (or not understanding) master slave relationships. I'll assume you at least are talking about PATA/IDE interface and not SATA. The OS doesn't care one way or the other what its designation is, your motherboard and the drive interface cares though. If you have 2 IDE drives on the same channel (same ribbon) they must be jumpered to Master and Slave or both as CS. If you have a single drive on a ribbon it can not be set to slave. Again this has nothing to do with the OS or dual booting.

I don't feel like butting into or countering anything gbhall has said so I'll let him or someone else answer any remaining concerns you have.
 
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