Hi, I have 2 hard drives one for which I just backup onto, and I wanted to install xp on the second hard drive just for testing stuff when I want to. My hard drives are both 80gb S-ATA drives so I just want to know if I can have it so the computer will automatically boot up into the first drive and straight into windows like it does now, but if I want I can choose to boot into the other drive. I don;t want it so I have to choose which windows installation to boot into every time, just when I do want to choose (Like when you press F8 and you can choose to boot into safe mode etc.)
I am using Xp home, but I also have a version of profesional if that is any different in regards to booting.

You can just install Windows XP right now, and then, in config panel change the boot options so that it doesn't display the screen unless you press F8 at boot to bring it up.

When you say Config Panel wher eexactly do you mean

Start => Settings => Control Panel => System => Advanced (tab) => Startup and Recovery: Settings => Select default operating system, uncheck both boxes (Time to display ...).

Thanks, il try it out and see how it goes.

                look at this website for Dual-booting or you can Google on Boot Loaders http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ there is another called Lilo to . also another one i think is called System Commander . also look through this    http://www.google.com/search?q=boot+loaders&start...=org.mozilla:en-USfficial

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Originally posted by Demandred
look at this website for Dual-booting or you can Google on Boot Loaders http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ there is another called Lilo to . also another one i think is called System Commander . also look through this    http://www.google.com/search?q=boot+loaders&start...=org.mozilla:en-USfficial

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Originally posted by TheBlasphemer
I'd suggest vmware workstation (http://www.vmware.com), it allows you to create virtual machines that can run any other OS within your current OS.

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Well I want to run 2 copies of XP, I just have some certain things that willl NOT run under service pack 2 and I want to keep it installed so I figured I would install xp on the second disk and just put on what I need to run these programs, and I could also using it for testing crappy programs to keep things cleaner on my regular drive. I just wanted to make sure I could have the option of which windows instalation I wanted to boot into without losing the convenience of just turning the computer on and going straight to windows.

I will try lhunath's method tommorow and see how it goes. Thanks to everyone who posted

Yeh works perfectly thanks for your help guys

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Originally posted by FadeToBlack
Yeh works perfectly thanks for your help guys

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If I edited my post it wouldnt show up as a new post would it? So nobody would see my reply.

Forum rules don't allow double-posting, and we will see your post anyways. Well, I see you got it working, but I wanted to say a few things:
- VMware is great for testing, but it's not free.
- You don't need any loaders to have a multiboot with many Windows versions, if you install them in the order they came out it will create the multiboot correctly during installation.

So does this mean you can choise which Hard Drive to boot up to when you turn the computer on?

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Originally posted by pr0xy

So does this mean you can choise which Hard Drive to boot up to when you turn the computer on?

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You can set it so either the message comes up for which one you want to boot to, or it just boots to the default one unless you press F8 to bring up the boot selection menu

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Originally posted by lopardo
s it will show you a menu from which you can choose

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