Windows 7: 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

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.

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.

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.

This topic is precisely the reason I like to have external switches for the power supply to each drive...

Yeah, tell that to Dell, LOL

Umm there is this really cool feture in the BIOS from the 90's it's called boot order. No need to disable drives.

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.

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