Best way 2 prevent drives from being accesed in a dual boot system

[chadsxe]

Lets say I am setting up a dual-boot system. I have XP on one hard drive and Vista on another. When you are in Vista you can see the "system drive" for XP and visa versa. I would like to prevent each OS from seeing the other OS in fear of data corruption. Was wondering if any of you had a solution.

Regards

Chad

 

[montyuk]

heh my personal solution was to manually disconnect the drive i wasnt using at the time, you could also try disabling it in the bios.

if you are doing this having completed your dual boot setup then disabling one drive may give you bcd / boot.ini errors so look up easybcd and that might help with that.

otherwise disable one drive, install on the other, switch and repeat.

im sure theres plenty of people on here who have other suggestions, this is just what worked for me.

 

[merlinbadman]

I used a dual boot for ages with no problems at all, both drives were always connected. The boot manager allows you to choose what OS to boot.

Why would you think there would be data corruption issues? When you are in one OS, it doesnt "see" the other one, its just a load of files on another HDD like any other.

 

[pysyrian]

If you wanna take that route (as I did)
just go into your Windows-Control Panel-System-Hardware-Device Manager and go to the opposing harddrive and disable it.

After a quick system restart.....voila! no more harddrive in your way through each OS respectively!

EDIT---You could also just open my computer, right click the opposing drive and select properties, click the hardware tab, find the opposing drive in the list of disk drives (you'll need to know the location it's configured for out of your physical setup) and select it, now click properties, under the general tab you should see a drop down tab that's titled device usage, simply select disable----EDIT

WARNING! I'm pretty sure this WILL NOT work with one physical harddrive divided into multiple partitions. I have two physical harddrives with an OS installed on each. I haven't tried it with just one harddrive, so do so at your own risk!!!