Windows 7 - second physical hard drive?

Hi, if I have PC tower with a spare hard drive slot. If I place a new HD in there, will that automatically give its a drive letter?

Ideally I would prefer to install another OS on that drive?||Is that possible?||Thanks

Yes, although not entirely "automatically". You have to format it and may have to assign a drive letter to it in Disk Management.

You can install to a new drive.

Be sure to disconnect the other drive before you start. Otherwise, you could have problems.

1-Probably

2-Yes and relatively easy. Let us know when you are ready. You might want to investigate the tutorial section here on SevenForums.

Yes, providing you initialize (format the hard drive) first or it is already formatted.

When you do so you can either allocate a drive letter or let Windows allocate the next available one.

Do you intend dual-booting? If you going to use it for another operating system, you might want to consider using a solid state drive (SSD) for a real performance boost.

SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

wow! Thanks for all feedback. I would like to dual boot ideally from different physical drives. Essentially that would be achieved by a OS Grub Loader right? OR I guess I can set that in the BIOS?

Am I over designing this? Do you reckon there is an easier way to have two OS from individual physical drives?

Thanks again

Go through my thread and see if it can be of any help you!!

Installing OS on two Internal Hard Drives

You can set your computer up to boot up automatically into a default OS of your choice. This is done by setting the HDD/SDD containing the required OS as one of the main boot devices, usually after the floppy and optical drives. For other OSes, this can be done via the one-time boot menu, usually accessed by pressing F12 (check motherboard manual for actual key to press) when turning the system on. Note that drives in this case will be identified by the manufacturer's name rather than the name that you have assigned to it/them. They might not necessarily appear in the same order each time.

I have done that on the same drive on my laptop and setup a dual boot. That is done by linux easily since it create a really simple GRUB which allows you to select which OS you want. What I was wondering was whether I can have two physical drives containing a different OS - and how I go about being able to select which OS I want to use....

Can you please expand on this? Surely one of the OS/HDD has to be the primary? Would this be done in the OS software?


I guess that is the easiest way - going into the BIOS each time, but that would be a pain -

If anyone could confirm or further refine that would be really helpful and thanks as always for everyones invaluable help.

My fav way of dual booting is to have each OS on its own HDD, and select the required OS from BIOS. You can set the BIOS to start with your most-used OS as default.

Just unplug the HDD with orig OS and install 2nd OS on 2nd HDD. When thats working, plug in both HDDs.

This keeps everything separate with no need for Grub etc and you can go back to orig setup if you change your mind (or add even more OS's/HDDs).

but with the recent price rise of HDDs . . .