How can I share a single disk between multiple systems?

[jaredkuper]

I have a great brain-teaser scenario. Something unique that I haven't been able to find any info on...

I have a SINGLE physical disk which I will be plugging into TWO different Sytems with different CPUs. My problem is that if Windows is installed while the disk is in System1, when I plug it into System2 (with different CPU brand) there are obvious hardware differences and of course I get BSOD.

My approach has been to create two partitions, one for each system. Is this the only or best approach?

Step 1 - I am able to create two different partitions on the drive, one partition has Windows install for System1, the other partition has Windows install for System2.

Step 2 - ? How can I get an automated start-up script that could detect which System the disk is plugged into (is CPU1 present or CPU2 present?) and then have it choose the correct boot partition? I have seen where there are options to manually choose it of course, but I need to create something automated.

 

[Ztruker]

Why would you want to do this? It's a disaster waiting to happen in my opinion.
Buy another disk and keep one in each computer. Much simpler and a whole lot safer.

 

[Berton]

The literally-easy way I've found to share an HDD between computers is a NAS/Network Attached Storage device. I use a WDC 1TB drive plugged into my Router via an Ethernet cable, can access it from any computer, either wired or wireless, and from different Operating Systems, i.e. WinVista, Win7, Win8.1, Linux and Mac OS X. The NTFS formatting is not an issue in saving files that are created by installed programs, images, etc. Some Routers have a USB port that may allow accomplishing the same thing, mine does but I haven't needed to set it up yet [replaced the older Router after getting the NAS].

 

[Ztruker]

Berton, can you boot from it? That is what jaredkuper wants to do.

 

[Berton]

I missed that but No, the drive needs a direct connection to a computer for that. Although, I haven't investigated the BIOS setting of booting from a LAN.

 

[AddRAM]

That`s silly

Just buy another hard drive.

But with 2 partitions, I don`t see why it wouldn`t work.

Give it a shot, let us know how it turns out.