2 HD Drives Same OS on Both

[scottkli]

I have a 10gb drive and a 250gb drive. I want to put WinXP Pro on both drives and be able to boot to one or the other. I have 2 onboard IDE connectors and 2 IDE connectors on a Promise Ultra TX100 card. Do I need some sort of software for booting between the two drives, and how might I go about connecting these to my IDE connectors? The reason I want to do this is for security reasons. I want to keep all my Internet, Email, Downloads etc. seperate from my Data and other secure stuff. Before booting into the second drive I will disconnect any Internet or Network connections. I assume this will keep my Data on my 250gb totally secure. No viruses, trojans etc. Any advice would be helpful.

 

[arkus]

Erm, I'm not so sure it worthwhile from a security perspective... I reckon that anything that got into your Internet connected installation of xp could quite easily get transferred to your non connected drive.

But, if you want to do it...

-Install WinXP as per usual on your drive for net connection.

-Turn off your PC and disconnect that drive.

-Insert WInXP CD and boot to it. Install to the drive you want your non-net connected installation on.

-Choose in BIOS when you power-up which drive to boot to.

I'm sure you could use third-party software to choose from a boot screen which drive/os installation to boot from, but it's not necessary.

 

[sjonnie]

I agree, from a security perspective this is not necessary. Just install Norton Antivirus and a decent firewall and you'll be fine.

A simple software way to do it would be to unmount the 250GB drive from your 10GB WinXP setup and simply disable the network device in the 250GB WinXP setup. Then you can use the XP OS loader to boot between the two.

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