OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

...Supposing someone wanted to upgrade to XP Pro, install it on a, say, 500GB HD and then copy over stuff from an XP Home install HD (So savegames and important data, like my RPGs don't get lost),

Would booting with two HDs with an OS in each cause problems and, if so, how do I get around them?

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

I have heard this will create a disaster, but don't know the details. XP is apparently rather odd in the way it uses disks and partitions. The booting OS would probably rewrite a bunch of control files in the other partition and make it unbootable. But it might be even worse than that and trash both copies of the OS.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

It doesn't cause a problem. I've done it many times when a computer died so I could make emergency backups before doing repairs.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Do you have to set jumpers or something?

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

You might, but IIRC only if the drives are attached using the same cable.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

I installed XP Pro (sp2) on a second logical partition (D:) of my only physical drive. When it booted, it would pause during the DOS boot sequence and give a choice of which operating system to boot into. Did that so that I could copy my important stuff over to D:, then format C:.

Later, I found a better way: I put the My Documents folder on d: drive. Might try to move the 'Documents and Settings' tree over to D: next time I format.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Fortunately, reality is much different from what you have heard. This isn't windows 98 we are talking about, here. Sure winnt's boot loader is no Grub, but it works fairly well when you stick within the realm of Windows OSes...

Narf:
An OS installation on a second HDD (or partition) is just treated as normal files when you are booted into a different OS. Install time is a little different; if you leave the drive in the compie when you install XP Pro, it will detect the second OS installation and create two entries in the boot loader, one for the old and one for the new. You will then be able to choose which of the OSes to boot into.

Assuming you plan to delete XP Home once you have XP Pro up and running (a sage course of action), I'd recommend that you take out the second HDD, install XP Pro on the new HDD, then reconnect the old HDD to copy data. This way, the 500 GB drive will be treated as the master drive/partition and the boot loader will be placed on it for your XP Pro installation. It will also save you hassles later when you go to delete the XP Home installation to reuse the disk (namely, you won't have a useless entry in your boot loader).

Also, I'd recommend that you create two partitions; one at 10 GB and one using the remaining space. The 10 GB partition will be just for windows. Data and programs would then go on the other partition. This makes it easier to reformat and reinstall windows in the future, should the need arise. You can remap My Documents type folders with TweakUI (part of XP Power Toys) if it is too much hassle to not use them.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Different hard drives have different jumper settings available. The usual ones are Master, Slave, and Cable Select. The BIOS on your mother board decides based on the cable position and what the drive tells it (determined by jumper settings on the drive) which drive is the Master, and uses that drive's boot area to determine where the OS(es) it will use is(are).

In general, you should be able to set up an OS on a new drive, and then put in an old drive from an old system, setting that drive in position and/or jumpers to make it the slave, and you'll get what you want.

However, since XP has evil "authentication" software designed to give M$ an excuse to invalidate your license and make you buy Windohs again (see, it doesn't abuse its monopoly position enough to get enough sales, because its goal is as much profit as possible, so nothing is ever enough), and one excuse it uses is thinking that you may be trying to install Windohs on a new computer. Since it was installed on a computer with one hard drive, and now there's another hard drive, it may "determine" that you need to do annoying things to prove you have the right to run Windohs XP...

Personally, I'd upgrade to Win2K Pro instead of XP Pro. No evil authentication, less annoying crud, less bloat.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Is there a known issue with Win98? I've done that kind of HD manuever several times on Win98 and seen no problems.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Windows 98 doesn't have a boot loader in the sense of the nt loader, lilo, grub, etc. It takes over as the only bootable option once you install it onto a drive. That's all I meant by it, in reference to BM's misinformation about XP destroying both (Windows) OSes when you do a multi-boot installation. You can certainly juggle hdds for different 98 installs, but XP doesn't destroy other Windows OSes, typically.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

He wasn't asking about multi-boot installation. He was asking about attaching two drives with two independently installed copies of the same OS to one computer. (XP 'Home' and 'Pro' are essentially the same OS.) I repeat, this is reputed to be dangerous. Directions for making backups by 'cloning' from one HD to another are very explicit not to try to boot the computer from the drives while drives with both copies are attached, but to only boot from the cloning utility (a CD, that is). Unless you have an elaborate boot manager like GRUB which can hide one of the copies from the other. Two different installations may not be exactly like a cloned backup and an original, but it sure isn't the same as a multi-boot installation where Windows has had a chance to sort itself out, either.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Bah, I had two 98 drives in my PC for a long time; if the master drive ever failed, the PC would automagically boot up using the slave, and the only difference would be the missing drive, and TC's SE4 desktop instead of a plain red background.

Considering the Canadian HDD curse, it was a sensible precaution.
Sort of a manual RAID thing.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

But Win9x is not remotely the same as WinNT/XP.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

But Windows XP is, and I have done what you're warning against without incident. If its mentioned during HD cloning, you probably have to have an actual clone for it to be a problem. Two non-identical installations are fine.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Which way he was asking (independent installs or installing to the 500 GB with the other drive still in place) isn't entirely clear (probably because he was implicitly asking how to do this). The safest bet is to plug just the 500 GB in, install XP Pro, then reconnect the old drive to copy files over. No need to worry about your MBRs in that case.

=0=

Two independently installed* copies of XP on different drives will not interfere with each other. Each drive will have a separate MBR, and only the MBR from the first drive will be used for booting. The NT boot loader does not try to detect other OSes at bootup; only the Windows installer application (and the fixboot/fixmbr apps on the recovery console) does this. The files on the second HDD are treated just like any other set of files; Windows won't randomly start thinking system files are on D/E/whatever. You won't be able to boot the second install up without changing your hardware configuration to set its drive as the primary master (or taking the other drive out so that it is the only drive). When you do, it will again not do anything to the files on the secondary drive. You do not need to "hide" one OS from the other if you connect two drives that each have an OS on them that was installed independently.

If you set the old hdd as a secondary drive, then instal XP on the new 500 GB drive, you get a multi-boot setup. AFAIK, there is no way to avoid that (without some interesting settings on a customized unattended install disk), as it is done automatically when the installer detects a pre-existing OS (assuming you don't choose to upgrade that OS in place). You can take the other OS out of the boot loader after the fact, naturally. I forget if Windows installer will use the old MBR and just add the new info to it, or if it will ignore it and create an entirely new MBR on the first primary partition of the primary master drive with info for booting both OSes. But either way, the OSes themselves will be intact, and you can simply restore a working MBR on the old HDD (after taking the new one out) with the recovery console on the XP cd to get the old install of XP working again.

* Meaning you put in one drive, install XP, take it out, put in the other drive and install XP on it.

SJ:
Win98 had a really primitive boot loader. It did not try to gather information about all installed OSes and manage them from a single MBR.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Just to clarify, from what I want to do and what people are telling me I should do -

- Take out my current drive (Call it Home HD). Insert the theoretical new 500GB drive (Call it Pro HD). Install XP Pro. Then, shut down, install Home HD as a secondary slave drive using jumpers (Does Pro HD need to be explicitly set to master drive?), start up, copy over all the files I want.

Sometime in the future, which I'm sure I've got everything, wipe Home HD.

Eat cheese.

(Thanks everyone!)

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

The default setting for jumpers is usually cable select. If you put the drive you want as master on the end of the IDE cable, and the other drive on the middle connection, you will usually get them detected as such.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf-JAVA.../c00180570.jpg

Or, you can futz around with explicit jumper settings, which is not very much fun.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Forgive me for my ignorance, but wouldn't it be easier to use a (or several) CD-RW('s) to manually copy the necessary files from the old hard drive and copy them onto the new hard drive?

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Depends how much data there is to move. Moving the hard drive is often really easy and fast, and having 2 physical hard drives can be nice for performance, too (e.g. OS swap file on its own drive).

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

CD-RWs are horrendously slow, and do not help much if you forget about some files you want off of the old hdd. Much easier to just connect both (post installation of XP Pro on the new hdd).

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

94.2GB. No thanks on CD transfer.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Please note that Grub in reality is a horrible program, I have ubuntu and windows on my tablet and I delete ubuntu but for some reason Grub crashed whenever I turn on the computer even if I don't try to boot into the Ubuntu installation that doesn't exist anymore... So I had to reinstall ubuntu just turn on my computer again and currently have no idea how to get rid of it without this happening again.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Deh! You remove GRUB and expect it to continue to function? It's stored on the Linux partition, you know. If you delete your C:\Windows directory do you expect windows to run? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

If you don't want Linux anymore you should run Windows install again and have it reset/rewrite the boot sector. Then you can remove your Linux partition with no problems because it won't be looking for the missing GRUB.

Re: OT: Want a new hard drive...
 

Yeah, unless you tell the GRUB installer to install into the MBR, it kind of depends on you not deleting it to function...

Run the fixmbr program from the windows CD's recovery console to get a new NT boot loader in the MBR.

For reference, you can screw up NT's boot loader by deleting it too. Try installing Win98 on your machine after installing XP. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif