2 hard drives 2 operating systems

davegt3 · 2 Jan 2011 at 18:48

hi guys im thinking of putting in a second hard drive and installing windows 7.
just wanted to know if i would still be able to acess my files on my original drive which has vista installed untill i can redownload/transfer all of my programs and games etc

JonJ678 · 3 Jan 2011 at 00:29

It's possible. Windows is likely to do eccentric things with the bootloader if you try to install to one drive when a different one already contains a windows bootloader. The trouble-free approach is to unplug the current hard drive and install windows 7 while only the new one is connected.

Then plug the other one back in. You can choose which one boots by default in the bios, or by swapping the cables over. During boot you can hit a certain key, F8 (or F12 or another one, board dependent) if you want to boot from the earlier drive.

Whichever one you boot from should be able to read files from the other, while both are plugged in anyway.

A tidier solution involves configuring the bootloader to provide an option to boot from the other drive, which is trivial with grub legacy so may be trivial with microsoft's loader. I don't know how the syntax works though, so that'll have to wait for google or a windows guy.

terrystar · 4 Jan 2011 at 18:16

Im sure you can in BIOS disable the boot sequence then enable your hard drive with W7 as 1st boot.

Anyone else agree or am I wrong?

arknor · 4 Jan 2011 at 18:18

shouldnt windows detect the os and give you a choice screen on boot up anyway?

people have been duel booting since windows 98....

PhillyDee · 4 Jan 2011 at 18:30

Windows will make its own bootloader, but if you decide to move completely to W7, then it will cause a major headache, its not just a case of unplugging 1 drive and the easiest way is to do a full brand new install!

Just switch to W7 full time. Its far better than Vista.

arknor · 4 Jan 2011 at 18:35

how will it cause a major head ache? you can just unplug the other drive then run windows repair and it will make a boot sector on the windows 7 drive

PhillyDee · 4 Jan 2011 at 19:24

Yeah, tried that before . . . . It never worked. It never worked doing the same vista and xp and w7 and vista!
Took hours to finally fix it, and I am not even sure what I did! It is because the bootloader is on a different drive to the MBR, or something like that! Either way, just repairing via the disc did not work.

jsp21c · 5 Jan 2011 at 13:38

I'd suggest installing Windows 7 with just the one disk attached to prevent it putting the 100MB boot partition on another disk.
Re attach your other disk with Vista & your files on that disk would be browsable or movable when operating from Win7.
You can select disk boot priority in the BIOS and probably hit F8 at Boot to change boot order quickly. (I sometimes boot my HP laptop from a USB linux OS and in my HP's case it's F9 to select boot device).