Okay so I have a question for the Tom's Hardware community. I currently am running a computer for personal use. The operating system is Windows 7 Ultimate. I have a 1TB Seagate Hard Drive dedicated to the OS. I think it's 5800rpms. My storage hard drives for games(except for games that require to be installed on the C: Drive), movies, and pictures are on three 698GB Western Digital Hard drives(all quite full). Don't remember their RPMs. My ram is 16gb, and I have a MSI Mpower z77 and I have an Ivy Bridge processor 3.50ghz. While all this information not be necessary to the question I figured it would give you guys a better picture of what I'm wanting to do.
Recently I got a job doing data processing and eventually the work is going to require me to work at home, since I'm currently working at my bosses personal office space near his house. Most correspondence with employees will be online. And the sharing of data between employees will be on cloud based systems like G-drive or media fire, but will require to be downloaded to my local computer to process and reorganize and then re-uploaded back to the cloud sharing area AND to our business's database.
With that being said, my boss doesn't want me to have to use my personal computer I use for fun to use for work. Since I don't have the money for a new build, I figured why not dual boot. Now I've raided in the past and also done partitions to make the main OS drive read as two. I've used virtual machines to dual boot or attempted partitions with one hard drive, but that never works well for me in the end. I've had problems with data recovery when the hard drive or power supply in my computer goes bad. Or for some reason the partitions end up corrupting later on due to heavy management of data and then I lost everything.
I'd rather not go through that again. So for this time around I'm dual booting on two separate drives. But I'm at a loss here since I've never dual booted from two physical drives before and don't know the best way to go about this. This is my preference to doing things since I'm very paranoid.
I'm going to be buying another hard drive next week. I'm debating over a normal hard drive of about 2TB to 4TB of storage and possibly 7200rpm or a 2TB SSD, since my work does data processing, creating, deleting and rewriting large amounts of data(excel spreadsheets, images resizing, code script files) multiple times a day.
I'll be installing on that another Windows 7 Ultimate operating system (IF I can find one), since that's what the work place uses, and features that are in Windows 7 needed for work were deprecated or removed in Windows 8.1 and 10.
So when I do get the dual boot going and both Operating systems installed, one will be for work and one will be for play.
Question 1. Will I be able to label each hard drive so that when the boot menu comes up to chose from, can I have a unique label instead of like ST005950985 and ST0073930? Like Windows 7 (Work) and Windows 7 (Personal)? I will forget which hard drive is which unless it has a unique labeling system. Is this possible?
While my motherboard has the option to make secondary hard drive hot-swappable, there is a problem on why I haven't gotten used this feature. When internal hard drives become hot-swappable they are read like externals, meaning you can remove said device. The motherboard driver update intended to fix bugs for the hot-swap option breaks it even more. For some reason after I update the drivers for hotswapping the icon that is supposed to make the internals read like externals and be able to disabled removed, never appears. So I have no way to remove a selected hot-swappable hard drive when my computer is on. This leads into my second question.
Question 2. Can I have just one of the Windows OS drives read my secondary internal hard drives and the other OS hard drive not read the secondary internal hard drives? You probably guessed, I'd like to not have the operating system that is on the hard drive dedicated for work be reading my secondary hard drives. I would just like the OS hard drive dedicated for personal use to read my secondary drives and the Work OS hard drive not read my hard drives.
I'd rather not unassign the drive letters and reassign the drive letters each time as this is a big hassle when it comes to linking.So in more detail, I need the work OS hard drive to completely ignore my secondary hard drives hard drive as if they aren't even there. No caching, no indexing. I don't want any data being saved on the work OS drive as I'll need every bit of space I can. My job deals with processing a whole Terabyte of data at times. Also I need the OS hard drives to NOT read or even recognize each other. Again, no caching, no indexing, completely invisible as if they aren't even in the computer when one OS is booted. (I.E. I'm on the Personal OS drive and inside windows but I don't want to see the work OS drive show up as a secondary drive in My Computer.)
Question 3. I've read stuff about how when dual booting, on a failure this can cause corruption of the second bootable operating system. Is this true for dual booting between two physical drives? Can there be corruption from one cause corruption of the other OS?
I hope I'm not shooting for the moon. I know this was as long question, but if anyone has a good solution to dual boot between two different OS hard drives, and ease my paranoia, that would be great.
Recently I got a job doing data processing and eventually the work is going to require me to work at home, since I'm currently working at my bosses personal office space near his house. Most correspondence with employees will be online. And the sharing of data between employees will be on cloud based systems like G-drive or media fire, but will require to be downloaded to my local computer to process and reorganize and then re-uploaded back to the cloud sharing area AND to our business's database.
With that being said, my boss doesn't want me to have to use my personal computer I use for fun to use for work. Since I don't have the money for a new build, I figured why not dual boot. Now I've raided in the past and also done partitions to make the main OS drive read as two. I've used virtual machines to dual boot or attempted partitions with one hard drive, but that never works well for me in the end. I've had problems with data recovery when the hard drive or power supply in my computer goes bad. Or for some reason the partitions end up corrupting later on due to heavy management of data and then I lost everything.
I'd rather not go through that again. So for this time around I'm dual booting on two separate drives. But I'm at a loss here since I've never dual booted from two physical drives before and don't know the best way to go about this. This is my preference to doing things since I'm very paranoid.
I'm going to be buying another hard drive next week. I'm debating over a normal hard drive of about 2TB to 4TB of storage and possibly 7200rpm or a 2TB SSD, since my work does data processing, creating, deleting and rewriting large amounts of data(excel spreadsheets, images resizing, code script files) multiple times a day.
I'll be installing on that another Windows 7 Ultimate operating system (IF I can find one), since that's what the work place uses, and features that are in Windows 7 needed for work were deprecated or removed in Windows 8.1 and 10.
So when I do get the dual boot going and both Operating systems installed, one will be for work and one will be for play.
Question 1. Will I be able to label each hard drive so that when the boot menu comes up to chose from, can I have a unique label instead of like ST005950985 and ST0073930? Like Windows 7 (Work) and Windows 7 (Personal)? I will forget which hard drive is which unless it has a unique labeling system. Is this possible?
While my motherboard has the option to make secondary hard drive hot-swappable, there is a problem on why I haven't gotten used this feature. When internal hard drives become hot-swappable they are read like externals, meaning you can remove said device. The motherboard driver update intended to fix bugs for the hot-swap option breaks it even more. For some reason after I update the drivers for hotswapping the icon that is supposed to make the internals read like externals and be able to disabled removed, never appears. So I have no way to remove a selected hot-swappable hard drive when my computer is on. This leads into my second question.
Question 2. Can I have just one of the Windows OS drives read my secondary internal hard drives and the other OS hard drive not read the secondary internal hard drives? You probably guessed, I'd like to not have the operating system that is on the hard drive dedicated for work be reading my secondary hard drives. I would just like the OS hard drive dedicated for personal use to read my secondary drives and the Work OS hard drive not read my hard drives.
I'd rather not unassign the drive letters and reassign the drive letters each time as this is a big hassle when it comes to linking.So in more detail, I need the work OS hard drive to completely ignore my secondary hard drives hard drive as if they aren't even there. No caching, no indexing. I don't want any data being saved on the work OS drive as I'll need every bit of space I can. My job deals with processing a whole Terabyte of data at times. Also I need the OS hard drives to NOT read or even recognize each other. Again, no caching, no indexing, completely invisible as if they aren't even in the computer when one OS is booted. (I.E. I'm on the Personal OS drive and inside windows but I don't want to see the work OS drive show up as a secondary drive in My Computer.)
Question 3. I've read stuff about how when dual booting, on a failure this can cause corruption of the second bootable operating system. Is this true for dual booting between two physical drives? Can there be corruption from one cause corruption of the other OS?
I hope I'm not shooting for the moon. I know this was as long question, but if anyone has a good solution to dual boot between two different OS hard drives, and ease my paranoia, that would be great.