Dual boot using BIOS at startup

[edong]

I recall someone in this site posted that it's possible and better to use dual boot using drive selection in the BIOS instead of the usual way of having to select between OS's. Like I posted before in another thread, my PC used to have only 1TB Seagate hard drive installed with XP Pro. But because I'm having problem with "always busy" disk, I decided to buy another 500GB WD hardrive and installed the same XP Pro and became the C drive. But when I tried to "repair" the OS installation in the Seagate (installed as 2nd drive), my PC became dual boot with Seagate being assigned as XP Pro and the new WD (C drive) became XP Home. I used the same XP Pro CD. Maybe that's how Microsoft designed it. Just to let you know the current situation.

Anyway, now I bought a family pack Win7 and I want to reformat the original Seagate and install Win 7 and have a dual boot using the BIOS hard drive selection.

1. Can I do it without opening the case and disconnecting first the WD drive?

2. Assuming I disconnected the WD drive and installed the Win 7 on the Seagate then re-connect the WD again as the 2nd drive this time, can I use the BIOS to select the XP Home(if it does not revert to XP Pro) in the WD drive to start?

Both are SATA and partitioned into three logical partitions. Thank you very much for the help.

[Nelson37]

1. NO. Never, ever install an OS with more than one drive connected, ESPECIALLY if you intend to move drives around and MORE ESPECIALLY if one of the other drives is already bootable. Such as the bizarre situation you encountered, which SFAIK is not possible if an XP Home install disk never touched the system.

2. It SHOULD work, BUT - you already have a very strange oddity happening - personally I would do a second repair install on this secondary drive - Actually I would install Win7 on the new drive all by itself, put in the old drive and copy all data to the Win7 drive, remove the win7 drive and delete all partitions on the old drive all by itself, do a fresh install, copy the data back.

I almost never use multiple partitions. Needless complication. Did you know that C,D,E,F will alternate partitions across drives in assigning letters? So if you have the setup you described, and put your swap file on D:, that's a different drive from the OS drive. Bad, BAD idea in a dual-boot setup.

There are LOT'S of other reasons, basically partition structure is fundamental, if it goes the whole drive goes, you want it as absolutely simple as possible.

[jman98]

In addition to Nelson37's good comments I would say that in my experience dual booting is almost never really necessary. There are times when it is necessary and I admit that but it's used far too much. In most cases simply running a virtual machine using VMware or some similar product on the original machine will suffice for most needs and it is far simpler to manage and take care of then resorting to a dual boot architecture.

[edong]

Nelson is right about the problems of having multiple partitions. I have experienced some. Okay. So, I will reformat the Seagate and install Win 7 by itself. Then I will try to re-connect the WD and see what happens on the dual boot. There are just too many softwares there which I can not re-install (from giveawayoftheday.com). Perhaps you can recommend a good A/B switch for my dual boot purpose. Thanks guys for the valuable input.

[RabidDog]

if you want/need to dualboot .. just do it the way it works for evryone else .. install older operating system, then install newer operating system to separate disk with the other system disk still there.
Then when you booty up u will get a little menu that will allow choice of OS and even default to the best OS after 10 secs

sent by Pidgeons .

[Nelson37]

What type of A/B switch are you talking about? No such animal for dual-boot, at least not for a long, long time. The BIOS setting is about as easy as it gets.

Sure, you can install two OS with both drives installed. After the massive fuckup occurs, which it will sooner or later, you will most likely decide not to waste your time with that idea again.

I can count on one hand the number of dual-boot systems I have seen over the last 20+ years that had no problems whatsoever. The number where massive problems have occurred needing serious repair and re-configuration is a much, much higher number.

[zoobie]

Listen to Nelson37

I tried something similar a few Summers ago and the massive fuckup came in the form of an extra connected drive being turned into raw data. It completely ruined all my captured video and data on the extra drive. I found that MS doesn't warn anybody about disconnecting any extra drives when installing. Back then, they didn't have a free little consumer tool to properly recover raw data like they now have (MiniTool Power Data Recovery). A few months ago, I accidently did the same thing - forgot to disconnect the extra drive(s) when doing something. That's when I discovered the above tool that saved my sorry ass from trying to config OS's.

[Poppa_Meth]

I've dual booted Win7 and MacOSX together on a Hackintosh, and WinXP and MintXFCE on an old desktop, as well as several other flavors of linux in the past. Never have I run into any of the issues mentioned so far in regards to the other connected disks. Maybe it's just trying to install multiple copies of Windows that is the problem. Your best bet may be to install both versions of Windows on separate drives with one drive at a time connected and then use a program like EasyBCD to add WinXP to the Win7 bootloader. I can't see trying to do the selection through the BIOS as being anything but a hassle.

[RabidDog]

ASus effectively uses Dualboot on their motherboards .. they call it expressgate. eg booting into a small linux distro just for web browsing and other non-windows tasks. Obviously thats across 10's of millions of installations, so it HAS to be bulletproof, idiotproof and tested to the nth level.

Your idea of using the Bios to select is also bad, as with two versions of the same operating system installed how will you know which has booted? (if left to default) ... potential for mega fubars.

permanently busy hard drive? turn off indexing, turn off virus scanning, it might be an indication of a disk on the point of failure or corruption (massive retrys). Possible virus/worm infestation.
SO make sure your backups are good, .. you DO have backups dont you??