Replies

Thanks Byron, all useful Info.

Hi Rui,

Good idea, I hadn’t thought of that, should do the job.

Hi Tim,

Yes we have two computers connected through the gateway. I had thought of pulling the ethernet cable, but decided there is always the risk I will forget when I reboot and leave the system vunerable, I really wanted a method that would leave my “Graphics” system totaly disabled unless I needed it for Activations. For me it needs to be goof-proof, and disabling the network card sounds like the best solution. I have no need for the local network on the “Graphics” system so that is no problem.

Thank you both for you input and ideas.

Max

Update! Update! Update.

I have finally got this sorted, uninstalled the bootloader – loaded a new OS image into the secondary drive – reloaded the bootloader. The dual boot now works as it should, when I boot to the secondary drive all partitions on the primary drive are hidden and the partitions on the secondary drive are now C,D,E & F and all linkages work.

Thank you everyone who provided their help, it is much appreciated.

Max

Hi Tim,

The Hitachi Drive is the primary drive of the computer.

From original post “am running XP Pro on my computer, with a 360GB hard disk ” the 360 was a typo actually a 320GB drive

I can find no method in BIOS of turning off any particular HD, you have the choice to boot from: Floppy, USB, CD/DVD or Hard disk. But no chioce as to which HD to boot from.

At present I have BIOS set to boot from CD then HD, set that way as I was running a bootloader off CD.

The 360GB is an Iomega USB External drive. ( don’t know the actual make of drive inside)

My main problem at this time is the drive letters of the 1GB ESATA drive, it will boot OK but the change of drive letters of the data partitions breaks the link between the programs and their data, if the drive letters had all changed to reflect the primary drive lettering it would be OK.

Ted Myer,

Tried out EasyBCD, unfortunately it doesn’t work with out Windows Vista, to use it on an XP machine requires getting the bootloader from a Vista installation, that I don’t have access to.

Thanks for the suggestion.
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Roderunner,

That was may take on the legality, I would also suspect that most dual boots are using the OS from a Previous computer.

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Tim Sullivan,

I Acronis I chose “Clone Disk” as that was the recomended method.

The External HD is connected through a SATA/ESATA adapter. The motherboard and Ext HD are both SATA II.

The BIOS see’s all the drives and see’s the Ext SATA drive as an internal drive.

Specs:

Board: Gigabyte G31M-ES2L

Processor: 2.6Ghz Intell Pentium Dual-Core

RAM: 2G

Hard Drives:

Drive 0: Hitachi HDT721032SLA360, 320 GB

Drive 1: WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1. 1000 GB

Drive 2; ST336032 OAS USB Device (HD) 360GB

OS; Xp Pro.

My primary drive was configured with 4 partitions.

Local Disk C
Data D
Media E
Backup F

I cloned this disk to the new drive using Acronis True Image Home 2009 as a result it contains the same partitions, with the primary OS active the drive order is now:

Local Disk C
Data D
Media E
Backup F
Iomega G ( a USB external hard drive)
Local Disk H (The new HD)
Data I
Media J
Backup K

I found OSL2000 boot manager and downloaded a copy to see if that would solve the problem.

I can now boot the secondary hard drive, when in that OS all the partitions on the primary drive are hidden and the drive order now becomes:

Local Disk C
Data H
Media I
Backup J
Iomega K.

The result is that it has broken the links between all the programs on the primary partition and any data files on the other partitions.

Had it assigned the rest of the drive letters the same as the primary drive it would all work OK

Probably some simple work-around for this but at present I just don’t see it.

Any suggestions would be helpful, I am afraid with age My “RAM” has become corrupted and hasn’t retained much of what I did know about the inner workings of a PC.

Thanks for your reply, Will check out EasyBDC, could be the answer.

Re: The legality, I can’t see a real problem as I would only be using 1 OS at any time on the computer it is registered to, besides every time I make a backup image of my drive it contains a copy of the OS.

Will see what other views come forth regarding this.

Thanks for taking the time to help me.

The one I use is Womble Multimedia’s MPEG Video Wizard DVD, I don’t have a video camera as such I do take some videos on my still camera and compile them. My main use is for editing video recorded from TV, Movies and Series. I record them to rewritable DVD in the DVD recorder then edit out the adds and add Menus then burn them to DVD. The beauty with this program is that you don’t have to recompile the video as long as you don’t make major changes. I can edit and burn a movie in about 30 min, everything else I tried had to recompile the whole video and would take hours to do so.

It’s worth a look you get 30 days free trial with no restrictions, I purchased it within the first week.