IDE & SATA Hard Drives on 1 computer?

F

Franglen

New member
I am currently running a Dual Core with a 320gig SATA Hard Drive with XP Pro SP2. I have a spare 80gig IDE Hard Drive With XP HomeSP2 I would like to add as a Dual Booting setup. The Motherboard has connections for both SATA and IDE.
How do I set up the Dual Booting? Does anyone know?
Thanks in advance
Franglen
 
I have a 500gb SATA HDD as primary hard drive, a 500gb IDE as primary master IDE, and a 320gb IDE as secondary master IDE, with no problems. I configured the SATA drive via BIOS to be the 'boot' drive, and have had no problems with it :)
 
Franglen said:
I am currently running a Dual Core with a 320gig SATA Hard Drive with XP Pro SP2. I have a spare 80gig IDE Hard Drive With XP HomeSP2 I would like to add as a Dual Booting setup. The Motherboard has connections for both SATA and IDE.
How do I set up the Dual Booting? Does anyone know?
Thanks in advance
Franglen
Click to expand...

When you turn on the computer the bios tells it which drive to boot from, so just change the pointer in the bios.


Cheerio John
 
The suggestions that they have given you would allow you to select one hard drive to boot from. However, if you mean dual-booting the operating systems themselves, that's a different kettle of fish. There's two ways you can go about setting up dual-booting.

One, you reinstall whichever operating system isn't on the primary hard drive. That would make the setup detect the current operating system and set up the computer to dual-boot between the original OS and the newly (re)installed OS.
Two, you can use a bootloader (a program designed to allow booting of more than one operating system) to configure the boot sequence on the primary hard drive. I can't think of any good bootloaders at the moment, so you would need to Google it. I wouldn't recommend heading that way unless you know exactly what you are doing. Most bootloaders do require a fair knowledge of how operating systems boot up, though some do have wizards that can help with the configuration.

Personally, I would just recommend installing XP over itself. So if your primary hard drive has XP Pro on it, then install XP Home over itself and the XP bootloader will setup the dual-booting for you. I hope that's clear enough for you.

Chris
 
Hi Chris,
By reinstalling XP over itself,does that mean I will lose all my data already installed on each HDD? I have about 150 GIG of stuff on the SATA2 and 45 GIG on the IDE.It's a bit toooo much to try and back up :eek:
The main reason I wanted to use the IDE is that I have a seemingly good copy of Trainz2006 on it that never seemed to give any problems when it was in the old computer. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh
I sometimes wish I was still a alcoholic.
Thanks mate
Frank
 
Franglen said:
Hi Chris,
By reinstalling XP over itself,does that mean I will lose all my data already installed on each HDD? I have about 150 GIG of stuff on the SATA2 and 45 GIG on the IDE.It's a bit toooo much to try and back up :eek:
The main reason I wanted to use the IDE is that I have a seemingly good copy of Trainz2006 on it that never seemed to give any problems when it was in the old computer. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh
I sometimes wish I was still a alcoholic.
Thanks mate
Frank
Click to expand...

If you boot from the old IDE drive on the new computer you will have problems. When you install Windows or practically any operating system it configures itself according to the hardware it finds. Your old computer will almost certainly have different chipsets on the motherboard etc thus even if it runs at all you can expect problems.

Cheerio John
 
You can have SEVERAL instances of, say, XP Pro on any of your other partitions or hard disks, whether they are on one hard disk or on two or more hard disks.

When you install XP Pro a second time, it finds the erstwhile XP Pro installation and you will be asked to overwrite it or to install it to a different partition/hard disk.

Once you installed the second instance of XP Pro (on a different partition or in your case, on a different hard disk) you will get a bootup menu at startup where the top XP Pro line is for the last installed version and the second line is the first installed XP Pro.

Now, if you do regular registry backups and save these to a particular place on your hard disk, you could in case of your erstwhile XP Pro's failure restore all your registry details to your second XP Pro installation and boot happily with it and use ALL your games, installed programs etc. from your first XP Pro installation.

Also, it will allow you to repair or reinstall your first XP Pro installation while your second XP Pro does its job. Then it is simply a case of restoring the first XP Pro's registry with the same registry back up to get everything back to where they were before. I did this several times in the past when for one or another reason one of my XP Pro installs bit the dust.

Or reverse all if your second XP Pro gives up its ghost. In any case, you will always have a working Operating System on your PC. (PSU/MoBo/hard disk failures etc excepted).

I hope this makes sense :)

Cheers

VinnyBarb
 
I'm going to "nail" two posts with this one reply. Frank, installing XP over itself will not delete your data. All it will do is essentially "clean up" Xp, to a certain extent. The registry will still retain most, if not all the settings you had previously. It will make XP detect the hardware in the "new" system and configure XP to use it.

John, I just replied to your post, with that answer. I know this because I have done it many times.

Chris
 
Thanks Chris....Vinnybarb..John etc.I may as well give it a shot because it certainly doesn't do me any good having a comparatively new 80gig Hard Drive staring at me from the desk and doing nothing. If I happen to lose the goodies then so be it.
One final question though.Should I disconnect the SATA HDD before I install the IDE (It's a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ULTRA ATA 80gig) If that means anything to you guys.
I have Partitioned Hard disks before but not added extra systems.
Thanks again guys
Frank
 
Franglen said:
Thanks Chris....Vinnybarb..John etc.I may as well give it a shot because it certainly doesn't do me any good having a comparatively new 80gig Hard Drive staring at me from the desk and doing nothing. If I happen to lose the goodies then so be it.
One final question though.Should I disconnect the SATA HDD before I install the IDE (It's a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ULTRA ATA 80gig) If that means anything to you guys.
I have Partitioned Hard disks before but not added extra systems.
Thanks again guys
Frank
Click to expand...

It would be better not to disconnect the SATA drive beforehand if only to avoid opening the case and dislodging a cable and also you want XP to discover the first version of XP so it comes up with a choice when you start the machine, do be aware this will add delay to the start up so if you have a family member who checks email on the machine you can expect some feedback.a

When you install XP the second time take it slowly and do not use the reformat the drive when you install.

Next time you install from scratch make a small partition say 50 gigs on the C: drive for the operating system it makes things like this much easier.

Also you can just use the drive, I'd probably reinstall TRS2006 but that's easy enough to do. That way you could free up the space taken on the drive by the operating system. TRS2006 does not have to be on C: and it can be installed along side TC, TRS2004 etc.

Cheerio John
 
Good one John.
The computer I'm installing the HDD to is not my main Internet computer.I have a copy of TRS04 on the WEB Computer as well and do all my downloads to it and then transfer them accross to the gaming computer. Which has TRS04 on the SATA HDD and runs beautifully.But 2006 gave me grief so I want it on a HDD on its own basically to see if that makes any differenceI run both computers via a KVM Switch.
No problems re the emails anyway mate as it's just me and the wife and she reads them after I've downloaded them and even then it's after she builds them up to a tally of around 200 or so. :hehe:
These women just can not be rushed can they?
Frank

PS>>> Just had a thought should I make the IDE a Slave drive or leave it as a secondary master?
 
The IDE drive should actually be primary master, that is it should be the first drive on the first IDE channel (or the only one if your motherboard only has one IDE connector). The CD/DVD drive should be secondary master (or primary slave if you have one IDE channel). The SATA is always a master drive, even if the BIOS reports SATA drives as slaves.

Being primary master won't make the IDE drive the boot drive.

Chris
 
Thanks Chris. I have 4 SATA Connectors and 2 IDE Connectors on he Motherboard. So no problems there.
I also have a copy of "Paragon Partition Manager 8.5 Personal" from the December 2007 PC Authority Magazine Disk. Which I will check out.

Hi Nis. Good to hear from you again.
I guess the time has come for me to stop asking questions and put everything into practice.
I'll let you all know in a few days what I've managed to stuff up.
God Bless
Frank
 
Hi Nis.
Great success with your tests.I'm sure you will pass with flying colours.I'm hoping to start on the computer Friday our time Nis.
I have to take the wife down to a place called Redland Bay so she can look after 2 of our grandchildren.
I usually stay overnight and drive back the following day if all is well. I haven't even taken the cover off of the Dual Core's Tower yet so I don't even know if I have a spare IDE Cable in there.
With all the help from everybody on the forum I am sure I will manage to mess up somewhere along the line.
I am going to try and Streamline my XP Disk and SP2 disk before I put the HDD in so that I don't have to uninstall SP2 etc.
God Bless
Frank :wave:
 
nismit said:
...cut...
Remember boot.ini is read only, so edit a copy of the file and do the renaming after editing.
...cut...
Click to expand...

I was under the impression that XP allowed you to edit and save boot.ini through the advanced tab of the system window.
 
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