Hard drives for multiple operating systems.
 

Hi people.

Instead of partitioning a large Hard Drive, I am thinking of getting a Western Digital SE16 320 GB SATA2 (Part # WD3200AAKS) for each operating system that I will be running. I have found them for just under 53$ but I am wondering if it is still a lottery hoping to receive the newer 00B3A0 version that is a single plater 320 GB. Anyone got any insight on the situation?

Thanks

Running two hard drives yields little bennifit unless you want to jump through BIOS hoops every time you boot.

Buy a 1TB drive and partition it 10x

Hmm. from what I understand, I will get a boot menu to choose which OS to boot into. Now, I have not done this before so I am unsure of what the outcome will be. Will I still get the "jump through BIOS hoops" with a boot menu?

I was thinking of a 1TB drive as well but, for storage.

You should prolly play with it then.

The BIOS normally boots from hard drive 0 and the boot loader will be installed on partition 0. Many modern BIOSsez have a menu option (F8) that allow you to pick the boot device. This includes USB, CD ROM, and any drive in your system.

If you duel (sic) install Win XP and then VISTA you will find the VISTA install will depend on the XP partition. That can be a real nuisance as the VISTA install can wind up being something other than the C: drive. Yes, there are lots of tricks you can play with this like using the BIOS boot selection to get round it but they are numerous and complicated. I am no expert but the experiments I have done were frustrating.

:dots:
heheh
1.Debian Linux
2.OpenBSD
3.FreeBSD
4.FreeBSDlite
5.Solaris for x86
6.BeOS
7.Netware
8.Vista64
9.Xp32
10.Partition for PRON

lol why not a home server? jking:rofl:

Why not just slap a bootloadter onto a small USB flash drive, connect it to one of the case's internal USB connections or something then have that set as your boot device that you use to select the other HDDs? That way you could easily swap the real HDDs in and out and such and if the HDD with your bootloader failed you would still have an easy time with the other HDD and replacement?
I know that messing about with an HDD that had a bootloader and OS on it pissed me off a while back so now I just use the boot device selector thingy by pressing F8 at boot.

I dunno.

I got another question. When I will want to switch OS, will I have to reboot or can I log off and end up in the boot menu again? Anyone know?

:dots:

reboot