Windows 7: duel hdd operating system

I have been asked the question is it possible to have two internal hdd system disks and select which one at start up.
any help much appreteated.

best regards topper.

Yes you can. If you have IDE cables you need to make one of them master,and another slave. If you have SATA/SATA2 you dont need to change nothing,just connect them to the motherboard.

Search for the boot time drive chooser key in your manual (in my computer it is F8). Press and hold that key right when the motherboard info screen pops up after power on .... it will show a list of all the Hard Disk Drives and Optical Disk Drives . Choose Which one you want to boot up using up and down arrow , and hit enter . Your desired disk will boot up rightly.

It's that simple .

Hello toppergraph, welcome to Seven Forums!



Have a look at the information below for some ideas and be sure to post back with any further questions you may have and to keep us informed.

   Information

The easiest way to do away with boot issues between separate Operating Systems (OS) is to use the BIOS one time boot menu to select which OS to boot at system startup, each motherboard has an individual hot-key to tap during system start-up to access this menu.

If you have 2 separate Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and have one OS installed to one HDD and you want to install another OS to the second HDD, disconnect the HDD with the first OS installed on it and leave only the HDD you want to install the second OS to connected.

Just be sure not to change where the original HDD SATA cable was connected, it has to be re-connected to the exact same port to avoid boot issues.

Install the second OS to the connected HDD and when complete and the system is booting good, power down and reconnect the first HDD with the first OS on it.

This way the OSs will boot independently of each other and there will be no boot conflicts between the 2 separate OSs to have to sort later.

Then set the BIOS to boot the HDD / OS you want as default and if you want to start the other (new) OS you use the BIOS one-time boot menu to select that HDD / OS to start when the PC is started.

thank you for your quick respons.

is it the same as using a single partitioned HDD with with diferant op systems?

Did you see my post #4 above?

Yes thank you will investigate

No it is much better as it leaves the HD's independent to come and go as you please.

Be sure to keep the other HD unplugged during install so that Windows doesn't configure it's own Dual Boot which interlocks the HD's.

Then when you reconnect both HD's, boot the preferred one via BIOS boot order, and select the other using one-time BIOS Boot Menu key which every computer and mobo has.

thank you all. still investigating, as i said in my initial post i was asked the question by a friend and he hasn`t got back to me yet.

i think i try for myself just out of intrest what is a good operating system to have a look at?

now running UBUNTO along with win 7. This looks interesting as i`ve just started to try and master c++ what a strange coincidance. All from a question from an old coleague i hadn`t seen for years.

again thanks all.