How do you boot up 2 Seperate HD on same PC with xp and w7

[kevvvin]

hi guys just wondering if you could help me with this little problem ?

I have a desk top pc with 2 HD one HD as xp on it and the other with windows 7, of which booth were formatted on this pc

At the moment i am switching between the two HD by unplugging and swpping over HD but it would be far better if i could switch between HD while both are connected perhaps on boot up ?


when i have tried to search this topic the general explainations are for duel boot up with 2 different OS on a single partioned HD which is not what i would like to do

do any one know a simple way or program that lets ou boot up with the HD that you require


thanks for any help guys

 

[MauveCloud]

Unless you're talking about physically swapping the hard drives before booting, just use the instructions you found, only skip any steps related to re-partitioning, and when it refers to one of the partitions, use one of the physical drives instead. Once partitions have been created on both drives (each would have one partition taking up the whole drive), there's not much difference between that and two partitions on a single drive.

Edit: if you have trouble with that, a quick search turned up this post that includes alternate steps for if you're using a separate hard drive:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html

 

[unksol]

^ that would make the most sense. except using the boot selection menu

 

[kevvvin]

thx for replys guys


ill have a go at this tutorial but a big part of this tutorial is mostly about formatting and im unsure exactly which bits i need to carry out and the ones that i dont



mauvecloud said
"only skip any steps related to re-partitioning, and when it refers to one of the partitions"

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html




is there any chance you could list the parts or paragraphs that i need to carry out and the parts i need to miss out cos i dont want to end up formating over my windows by accident

thx

 

[MauveCloud]

mauvecloud said
"only skip any steps related to re-partitioning, and when it refers to one of the partitions"

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html

Perhaps I didn't read your original post carefully enough. Most of the time when trying to set up a dual-boot configuration, only one OS is already installed. If you don't want to use the BIOS boot selection menu, or your BIOS/UEFI doesn't show both drives as boot options, I suggest you ignore my previous advice and install EasyBCD: http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/ on one of them, then add the other OS as a new entry.

 

[kevvvin]

ok thanks for your time and help

 

[kevvvin]

ok i have folled the proceedure as instructed and every thing works really well no problems, when the pc boots up the screen appears asking which windows you would like to boot and if not choosen it chooses windows 7 as the first bootable windows and after 30 secs it boot up that windows 7 on ts own

so just wondered if you can set it to boot windows xp first as default ? if you wanted to

thanks again for help

 

[MauveCloud]

It's been a while since I've used EasyBCD, but changing the default OS is considered part of the basics:
http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Changing+the+Default+Entry

 

[kevvvin]

Nice ! thanks again for being veryhelpful