boot old hard drives on a new machine.

blakeit · Mar 17, 2014

Hello, I want to build a 64 bit machine that I can easily swap out the primary hard drive from the front of the tower. I want to be able to boot a 32 XP hard drive or a 32 bit Linux hard drive or 64 bit Linux hard drive or a 64 bit win8 hard drive. I want to use an I7 Intel motherboard and a single set of 16gig ram. (I know the 32 bit systems wont be able to use all the ram.)

Possible or not?

rehed21 · Mar 17, 2014

No need to swap drives. Search for "dual boot" or "multi boot." You essentially install each OS on a separate partition or drive and using a boot loader choose which one you want to boot. XP will definitely have to be installed first, Windows 8 probably second, and Linux last.

jack6128 · Mar 17, 2014

I have been booting from three different installations of XP on three different hard drives with no problems. All I need do is enter the BIOS and tell it which disk to boot from. The MB is an Asus P5Q with an AMI BIOS.

Hawkeye22 · Mar 18, 2014

^ +1

I prefer seperate drives with seperate OS. Multiboot is fine, except if you mess up the boot loader you lose access to all your OS's. Be sure to only have a single drive installed when installing your OS's. This will force windows to put the boot loader and OS on the same drive.

If you do multiboot, remember that windows OS's have to be installed from oldest to newest.

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