Too old to crawl under the desk  

When I wanted to install an independent system (e.g. Win8) on another drive than my current OS drive, I used to crawl under the desk, remove the side panel, disconnect the cable of the OS disk and proceed. When the installation was done, same procedure in reverse order. I am really to old and too lazy for those gymnastics.

I wonder whether disabling the driver of the OS disk in device manager > properties would accomplish the same thing. Question is whether a) that would work and b) would the driver come back on reboot. Does anybody know??

PS: I could try it out but I like to first weigh the odds.

could put your computer on top of the desk

whs said:

Question is whether a) that would work and b) would the driver come back on reboot.

Haven't tried it, so it's an edu-guess but I suspect not.

And unless you permanently delete the driver (and from the winsxs folders as well) it's almost a certainty that the driver would be re-installed upon next reboot.

smarteyeball said:

whs said:

Question is whether a) that would work and b) would the driver come back on reboot.

Haven't tried it, so it's an edu-guess but I suspect not.

And unless you permanently delete the driver (and from the winsxs folders as well) it's almost a certainty that the driver would be re-installed upon next reboot.

If it comes back with the next system reboot, that would be OK because for the e.g. Win8 installation I would boot from the CD/DVD reader.

could put your computer on top of the desk

That's the setup I have in Germany. But here I have absolutely no room on the desk.

During the W8 setup procedure, the installation is still going to 'see' the current OS drive thanks to the BIOS, so 'hiding' the active OS drive from the OS itself will unfortunately be rendered superfluous.

smarteyeball said:

During the W8 setup procedure, the installation is still going to 'see' the current OS drive thanks to the BIOS, so 'hiding' the active OS drive from the OS itself will unfortunately be rendered superfluous.

Yeah, I am afraid you are right. But I think I can disable the drive in the BIOS too. Have to explore that. I'll do anything to stop the gymnastics.

Yeah, tell that to Dell, LOL

whs said:

But I think I can disable the drive in the BIOS too. Have to explore that.

If that is possible (although I've never seen that feature availble in a BIOS) that would be sufficient - you wouldn't need to remove/disable any drivers on the OS level.

I'll do anything to stop the gymnastics.

Entirely understandable. I hope I'm wrong about the BIOS level disabling :)