harley on 19/4/2009 at 00:43
Hello.
I am curious if someone could help me figure out how to boot from my 3rd hard drive. The main drive is 500g and has Vista installed. The 2nd is 250g and is pretty much empty for now. The third one is a 37g and has a fresh copy of XP installed.(had a bad storm, pc fried, upgraded, now this is where it is at)
What I want to do is use Vista for the majority of use and whenever I decide to play Thief, I would like to be able to restart the pc and boot from the 3rd drive with xp on it. How do I do that?
I am going to try and post a screen of my "system info" to help with hardware installed, etc. to help out. Is system information in windows enough to tell you what is needed to figure it out or is there something else I need to post. Thanks in advance.
Edit- Not sure it matters but they are all SATA drives.
bikerdude on 19/4/2009 at 10:04
yeah its doable, but how do you want to boot? automatically or manually.
The manual method
Most motherboards have a boot menu that you can call up when starting the PC
The automatic method
Install a linux graphical boot loader, this should list all bootable partitions/harddrives and allow you to set the boot order - eg what boots first.
There are better linux experts than me, so if I'm incorrect about the second way then im sure someone will be along shortly to clear things up.
:cheeky:
Displacer on 19/4/2009 at 12:54
Grub bootloader is all you need. It can boot most os's from any drive
harley on 19/4/2009 at 13:54
Thanks for the replies guys. I really don't know what I want to do for sure cause I don'e know the options. I thought it was possible to shut the machine down, restart, go into the bios and choose a different hard drive to boot from. Thats what I was wanting to do(only because it's the only way I had heard of it being done)
What would you reccommend I do to accomplish what I want?
Brian The Dog on 20/4/2009 at 13:01
The completely foolproof way of doing it is to turn off your PC, unplug all hard drives except the one you want to install the OS on, install it on there, and then afterwards plug in the other hard drives. This way there is no chance your new OS can mess up the others.
Grub bootloader should also work fine if you choose to use it. As for choosing which OS to load, most motherboards now have an option shown in the POST saying "Hit F1 for setup", and then another F key for the boot menu. Otherwise, you can always change the boot priority in the BIOS each time (gets annoying after a while though).
LeatherMan on 22/4/2009 at 05:09
No need to bring a third party boot loader to the party, just edit the Vista bootloader and be done with it. There's even a freeware program called (
http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1) EasyBCD designed to make it easy.
bikerdude on 22/4/2009 at 09:39
Quote Posted by LeatherMan
No need to bring a third party boot loader to the party, just edit the Vista bootloader and be done with it. There's even a freeware program called (
http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1) EasyBCD designed to make it easy.
Its not that easy. plus grub is OS independent.
