Windows XP on 2 HD's in Same Operating System!

Does anyone know if it is possible to have a "Master & Slave Drives" with Windows XP installed on both drives (in same computer system) so that when you boot up you are given a choice of which drive to boot up from? My computer is a Dell Dimension E510 with Pentium 4.

I have 2 SATA HD's in my computer and would like a choice of which drive to boot up to without taking cover off of computer and unpluging & pluging up Drive connections. There must be some way or perhaps some software to accomplish this. If there is no way please let me know and I'll just have to make other arrangements such as pluging, unpluging etc.

Primarily, I want to do this to be able to quickly recover from a HD failure and have access to both drives at will.I recently went through having to re-install my entire system due to HD failure. Also, I have Acronis True Image 9.0 to effect cloning my drives etc.

Thanks for any assistance you may be able to render.

Aarond38

 

Best that I know of for that is right here: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

 

Thanks for the speedy reply. I'll take a look at Boot It NG and see what it can produce.

Aarond38

 

No problem.

I hope you're not in a rush though. I'm sure others can pipe in with their favorites and give you some more choices.

 

Ghost 2003 here and I have a clone of C on a slave drive.

All I have to to boot from the slave is enter bios and set first boot device as "HDD 1".

"HDD 0" relates to the master drive.

 

Hi, aarond38

Just for reference, there is no Master or Slave with SATA HDD's.

Take Care,
TheQuest

 

Hello aarond38,

I have two XP's on two HDs, Master - Slave irrelevent.

Just install the 2nd XP on the 2nd drive - the install will create a boot menu manager.

If you're installing a new XP on that 2nd drive, create an OS only partition of 15 ~ 20 GBs and another data only partition on the rest of the drive. You can do that with the XP install cd. Makes drive imaging easier, less complicated, and faster. The data you would back up with normal backup procedures/software. Also if you ever had to re install the OS, don't have to worry about data, other than having to re install programs.

Regards - Charles

 

Thanks a lot Franklin, I did not realize I could do that and change the booting drive in the BIOS just like you can change the booting order from hard drive to floppy, CD, USB etc. I've got it now!!
Have a pleasant day.