Windows 7: Hard drive tray used to swap W7 boot drive?

randyrls · 30 Aug 2011

I do vertical systems integration and am getting more and more requests for Windows 7.
I have a drive tray used as the boot drive and I want to be able to swap out the boot drive in order to change OS's and Options. I don't trust multi boot installs, they get in each others way, and sometimes I need Linux in various distros. All the data i may need "across platforms" is on FAT32 partitions.

On my XP machine I have 4 HD that have XP installed with different software sets and options, and 2 with Linux. I just power down, swap the HD and power on again.

I already made a Windows 7 System Image and Recovery disk.

Is this doable in Windows 7?

Next is to figure out how to lock down the BIOS so it doesn't keep changing my boot options!

My HD list is
DRIVE 1 C: NTFS
WD 160GB SATA
Drive 2
WD WD5002AALX 500GB
partitioned:
Data files D: FAT32
Downloaded files E: FAT32
ARCHIVE F: Fat32
DRIVE 3 G: NTFS
WD WD5002AALX 500GB

Bare Foot Kid · 30 Aug 2011

Hello randyrls, welcome to Seven Forums!

This would be a whole lot easier, no swapping HDDs around, you don't even have to power-down, just reboot.

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.

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.

Asus - F8
HP/Compaq - Esc
Sony - F2
Acer – F12
Packard Bell
Gateway - F10
eMachnes - F10
Gigabyte – F12
Toshiba - F12
Dell - F12

randyrls · 31 Aug 2011

Thanks for the reply. I found that the Windows System Backup will happily reload the OS system onto another drive, and both drives are intact. I moved my Profile to my DATA drive and still need to relocate the documents folder to it's new home.

I once had a piece of _____ software erase the MBR on the system drive because it thought the security wasn't correct. After I calmed down and put the mbr back, my OCD kicked in and I pulled out my hardware debugger to see what happened. I found the code in the program was intentional.....

The old IDE system had 2 CD/DVD drives, 3 IDE HD, 2 removable drive trays, memory card reader, and a floppy.

Thanks to everyone for the excellent and valuable tutorials!

Randy S

Quote: Originally Posted by Bare Foot Kid

This would be a whole lot easier, no swapping HDDs around, you don't even have to power-down, just reboot.

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.

Windows 7: Hard drive tray used to swap W7 boot drive?

Hard drive tray used to swap W7 boot drive? problems?