Dual boot, two drives.

Hi.

I have two drives with different operating systems on, I want to be able to choose which one I boot from, but I can not find any setting to change my primary hard drive, without messing around in windows, which defeats the object. Will I need to alter the boot file?

Regards

Hi.

I think you should be able to press F12 and manually boot from the second.

You need to edit the Boot.ini. You can either have Windows automatically detect the drives, and just do a "rebuildbcd".

See here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

Or, you can manually edit the boot.ini from within Windows.

Well, been a while..

But I now have Windows XP on one disk, and Windows 7 on another. I can now choose which one to boot.

The former is the larger disk, with a primary partition. When I boot XP, I can see the other disk, with the data on, etc.. But when I boot Windows 7, I can't see the other disk, which XP contains, plus most of the programs I wish to install on Windows 7.

In Bios, it can't detect a Primary master or slave disk, but it must be there, otherwise I wouldn't be able to load it, from the boot menu.

They are both SATA drives... If works one way, I'm perplexed as to why It doesn't work the other way round.

I hope I've explained this as clearly as possible. Any more information needed then do ask.

Regards

Dave

When you installed them did you install Windows XP first THEN windows 7?
This can cause issues with detecting the other drive (or so i hear as i have not had any issue similar to this)

Yes It was Windows XP for some time, only recently 7...!
Is there any easy way around this...apart from transfering it to an external drive?