Here's my current setup:
3 hard drives, one is the primary containing the XP installation.

what i want to do:
add a fourth SATA drive, this time a 74GB Raptor, which will contain an install of Vista Home Premium.

I DO NOT want to install vista on a separate partition of one of my current drives, I want it added to the Raptor, which is 10,000 RPMs, and i want to be able to, for the time being, boot either OS from startup, and eventually eliminate the XP install a year from now or so.

what must i do to accomplish this? i've never attempted a dual-boot on different drives, so i'm not really sure what the machine will do when booting 2 drives with OSs. Google did not help me, as everyone else seems to want a dual-boot off of the same drive.

Plan B:
If, instead of the above I decide to just reinstall XP on the Raptor drive now, would it be beneficial to allocate a separate partition on that drive for use with Vista at a later date, were i to decide to do a single-drive dual-boot then? because allocating that partition ahead of time would eliminate the need to purchase a partitioning program later to repartition it.

p.s. If you're wondering why i'm going to all the trouble...the answer is "Crysis." I'm planning on upgrading my video card (watercooled 7800GT, overclocked) to a DX10 card (8800GTX), and will thus require Vista in order to use it. so for the keen readers with comprehension skills, the 7800GT card will be for sale :)

thanks!

you SHOULD, and correct me if im wrong fellas, be able to install it on which ever HDD you want, as long as it is read as a "primary" so that it will read it at boot. I just did this same thing but installed XP twice on my cusins PC. Just make sure you choose the letter(ex (K: ) ) of the drive that corresponds to the raptor. Aside from that i dont know what else to tell ya. But if it does work youll get an awefully ugly back screen in the beginning prompting you to choose which OS you want to use. Ill do a google search for ya just in case :thumbsup

Easy.
You get one of these things: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812156102
Use it for the Raptor.
Have your computer set to boot first off a secondary device and the HD in the computer as the second.
When that thing is plugged in, it will boot from the Raptor. When it's not, it will boot off your current HD.
I have one of those adapters and it's the best thing EVER! I now can use all my spare HD's as external storage and if I have to scan someone's computer for virus's or spy/adware, I can just plug it into mine without even removing their drive. :thumbsup

i think file transfer speeds on a 10,000 rpm SATA 2 drive would be seriously compromised by running it though a USB adapter.

Dual booting is usually done with a single hard drive with 2 or more partitions on it. In doing so, you're modifying the master boot record of the hard drive. The computer goes through POST, then starts reading the MBR from hd0 (whatever hard drive is first.... Kinda like Primary Master on IDE drives.) Normally, with a machine set to dual boot, it sees both operating systems then asks you which you want to run. Installing a second OS on a second drive then somehow getting it to write info to the MBR of another drive seems kinda tricky, especially with a windows install... We use dells here where i work. With the dells during POST, you have the option of pressing F12 and bringing up the boot menu where you could select whether you wanted to boot from a hard drive, cd, etc... So that might be an option for you, if its a dell, or your bios supports that. Other than that, im sure some sort of linux/unix solution is out there somewhere... but thats not really my area... im more of a PC and Mac kind of guy... Hopefully that helps.

You guys are over-analyzing this a bit too much.

By default, the OS reads the MBR to see where it needs to start from.

I'm not sure how Vista will react, but it should react similar to XP. When you install, you tell it to install on your new drive. It should pick up your current installation of XP and edit the boot.ini file to reflect multiple OS's, then installs.

Just in case, make a copy of your current boot.ini file located on the root drive (C:\).

Mine has this:

<boot loader>
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
<operating systems>
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut

If, for some reason you don't get a boot screen asking which OS, edit the current boot.ini file (probably on the root of the new Vista install) and add what was in the operating systems area from the original. This is where it builds the dual boot list and tells which device to look at to boot from.

**EDIT**
The < and > above are actually brackets on the { and } keys.

i dont think i over analyzed :shrug

Change the BIOS boot order. Tell it to boot off the other disk. Simple.

But then he'll have to do it everytime he wants to change which drive he wants to boot from...
Wait a minute... are you even going to be using XP after you get the new vid card? Why not just dump XP altogether and use the Vista drive as the primary boot drive?

*shrug*

Install grub. :) it'll boot just about anything if you're savvy enough.

Originally posted by DarkOne
*shrug* Install grub. :) it'll boot just about anything if you're savvy enough.

That was my second thought. Grub or lilo.

if you want fast boot drive for your vista later on then wait and get a SSD drive when they become reaonsably priced later this year. SSD > 10k hdd. it goes 0rpm and has a 32gig cache. hehe.


i can't wait to start using SSD technology. so much more reliable and energy efficient. platter drives are like the oldest piece of technology in computers today. of course for mass storage conventional HDD's are still the way to go just b/c the $/GB is so damn cheap.