I have read that using a computer specifically for financial transactions with known and trusted entities (such as a bank) is a good way to reduce (though not eliminate) the risk of your accounts being hacked by reducing the likelihood of inadvertently installing a malware, spyware, or virus by reducing internet sites visited. Assuming this is correct, I was wondering about dual booting one computer with two physical hard drives (each with its own OS) versus one hard drive with two partitions. I figure the former would be "more secure" since one drive would be isolated from any unwanted programs. However, since they shared a few things (motherboard and such), is this set up as "secure" as having two computers? If so, how does one go about setting up a dual boot with two separate hard drives of the same operating system using one computer?
Is there an easy way to dual boot on separate drives, i have installed windows 7 on 1 drive & vista on another. This was done independenly on the same machine as to say put vista on last year the got another hard drive took the vista drive out put new hard drive in & installed windows 7.I connected both. they see each other.I have read lots about reinstall one OS but nothing on if its already installed. IS THERE AWAY?
I currently have Windows 7 installed on two separate drives in my box. I can only set (select) boot sequence in the BIOS. If I recall correctly, way back when a boot selection menu would appear when I think I was running Windows 7 (when it first came out) alongside XP but that screen no longer appears with my current setup. Is there a way to get that screen back, or an alternate way to select the OS of choice without the hassle?
I have separate ide drives one is installed with XP Pro and the other with windows 7. I want to have the choice of either os when the pc boots i.e. choose the drive to boot the pc.
I have Window XP installed on Drive C:. My son installed Windows 7 on Drive E:. However, when the computer is booted up, it boots up in Windows 7, without allowing a choice. I suspect this can be corrected in BIOS, but don't want to screw it up.
I want to install 7 on a separate hard drive to see how it works & work indepenantly on it's own system. How can I if at all make it so when I am booting up I can toggle in between 7 & xp startups.
i have xp home 32 bit as my OS now and i have another hard drive installed and ready to install win 7 64 bit on to. can i do this with xp running or should i disconnect the HD with xp on it, then when i start the computer it won't see any OS and then i could boot from the win7 dvd and do a clean installl and then re=connect the HD with xp on it.
then when i start computer i should get the choice of which one to boot from or is this not the way to do it?? i want the OS's on separate HD's for now as i am sure that not everything that i want to run will work on the 64 bit win7 until i can afford to get all the programs i use to work on win7.
I currently have windows 7 ultimate in a Dell Gx270 P4 2.6ghz I know its old. And i want to Install Windows XP in another hard drive i have, but how do i make both hard drives boot, so i can select which one i want to boot.
I'm doing this because XP mode doesn't work in this computer. And i don't want to partition.
Most information i find in google requires partitioning and i don't want that.
If you know how please post it, or post the Links where i can find it.
My computer has windows 7. I created a separate partition on my hard drive to install windows xp, but now when I try to install it I get an chkdsk /f error.
I have got two separate hard drives one running Windows 7 one running xp. I need to be able to chose which os to run but currently I can only do so by pressing F12. I have tried EasyBCD but it wont work - does anyone know how I can do this?
Currently running Win7(64-bit) in RAID-0 on 2 WD Caviar Black's.I just purchased a SSD drive.What I want to do is load Win7 on the SSD and use that as my main drive, while also keeping my RAID drives boot-able and in tact as they are now. (Thus, a dual-boot Win7 setup)Will the BIOS allow me to select which drive to boot from upon start-up? My mobo is an ASUS Rampage II Extreme.
I've done some searching for this and found some similar issues but nothing fits exactly what I'm trying to do. I have been running Vista Ult. 64 bit for a little over a year and have loved it. It solved all the problems I had with XP Pro 32 bit on my hardware. I bought 7 Pro 64 bit through www.theultimatesteal.com since I'm taking some night classes. I forgot I couldn't upgrade from Ult.
to Pro so I had to do a clean install, which I did, on a separate drive. I have five drives in my system, C, D, and E are all 1TB while F and G are 1.5TB. C is where Vista is installed and G is where 7 is located. I'll be going back and forth between the OS's until I get everything the way I want it.
At that point I want to remove Vista and have 7 be the only OS. But I do not want to migrate the install onto the 1TB C: drive, I want to keep it on the 1.5TB drive but have it recognized as the C: drive. The install was done from within Vista from the download since my physical media has not yet arrived. So even when I boot into 7, it is seen as being installed on the G: drive; it did not make itself the C: drive.
So I'll need to get rid of Vista, get 7 to see itself as being the C: drive, get rid of the boot menu, and swap the drives and cables around to put my 7 install at the head of the HDD pack. I've already done a full system backup of my Vista install with Acronis TIH 2010. How do I need to go about this? On another note; why did MS only offer home and pro through ultimate steal? They offered Vista Ultimate. I mean, it is called ULTIMATE steal, not Pro steal afterall, and it would have made the upgrade process that much easier.
I want to combine my 2 desktops into one, since I never use both together and the older one is very dated by now (think Time/tiny computers old). My current machine is an Asus P5Q-E with a C2D and has one HDD on a SATA connection running windows 7 64bit. The old computer is a single core Athlon 2700+ thing with a pair of hard drives on a single IDE ribbon.What I want to do is put the hard drives from the old machine into the newer and be able to choose between Windows XP already installed on the old master IDE hard drive and Windows 7 on the newer SATA drive (I've only kept the old computer to run XP for compatibility), all the while keeping the old slave IDE drive as a slave.
dual booting windows 7 home premium x64 with linux fedora 14 on dual independantly dedicated drives. i am a college student with moderate computer (windows) knowledge but am doing software development and would like to play around with some linux for a class. i have no prior experience with linux and have minimal knowledge of operation. i am currently running windows 7 and would like to keep it as my primary os. i do not wish to share media files across drives or os's, windows does that just fine as is and i dont want to get into a third drive. my current drive is a 1tb wd black caviar hdd. it is also currently 2/3rds full and the desktop is about 6 months old so i would rather not partition the drive for a dual boot. i would think that there are some other advantages for the os's operating independantly off their own drives other than if one hdd dies i should still have the other with its os still ok. i have read some topics about RAID configs with dual boot setups with dual drives like this but am not very familiar with RAID. is there a RAID config that would be beneficial in this situation? i currently do not have a RAID card. my tower internals are not very accessible and i dont like the idea of disconnecting drives depending on which os i want to operate.
I would like to remove Vista from my dual boot setup. Here is how I got to where I am now.
I had Vista installed on my PC hard drive (was C. Later, I decided to install Windows 7 HP on a new and seperate HDD. I unplugged the Vista HDD and added the new HDD and installed Windows 7 as if from scratch (I was worried that the install would mess up all my files on Vista). After the Windows 7 was up and running, I then reconnected Vista redesignated it as drive E: and after some searching on how to, I created the dual boot using my Windows 7 disk so I'm assuming the boot file in on drive C: along with Windows 7.
I now want delete the dual boot and Vista so I can use the drive as a backup drive or possibly Win8. I have found several methods to do this but none that really have my specific situation.
I'm a long-time reader but new poster. I am currently running Windows 7. I want to install Windows XP onto another disc and have a dual-boot setup. I keep Windows 7 up to date and secure, but for the XP partition, I would rather not have antivirus running or even installed, in order to limit background processes. I will not be logging into any place or making any credit card purchases when booted into Windows XP. It will just be used for surfing, games, etc. Further, if and when XP becomes compromised or buggy, I will simply overwrite the partition with a backup image.
If I use Bitlocker to lock down the Windows 7 partition (with the encryption key on a thumb drive) and boot into Windows XP, am I correct in thinking the XP installation see or can't access the Windows 7 partition? If XP gets compromised, can a virus access or write to the Windows 7 partition?
Is there any other reason why this would not be secure? Can a virus write to the BIOS?
Here's my situation: I use 32-bit Windows 7, however, once per month I need to use 64-bit Windows 7. So I would like to install 64-bit Windows 7 to another drive. However, I don't want to see the dual boot menu on every restart. I only want to temporarily switch to 64-bit by pressing F8 (or whatever) to change booting device at bootup.
What's the proper way to do this?
Many years ago I used to have a situation where I had WinXP on one drive and WinXP on other drive. I could switch my C: (with WinXP) at bootup. It worked, except there was a problem: In some situations C:Windows and D:Windows or Programs Files were getting mixed up, automatically Start Menu pointed suddenly to D:Program Filessomething without asking me. I had used a clone software to clone the drive so that might be the reason why they mixed up together. Eventually removing the other drive might've crippled the system even my intention was to have two separate operating systems, just in one computer.
Basically I would like to have two C: drives with Windows 7-32bit and Windows 7-64bit. So in case one drive breaks, I'll have a very quick backup system ready.
Is it a stupid idea to disconnect the current C: drive and then install the new Windows to C: and then put the first drive in as well? Then I wouldn't have the dual boot menu, which might be what I want.
Is it possible to hide the dual boot menu, have it load 32-bit as default but still have a possibility to bring up the dual boot menu by pressing some key at bootup? In that case, is it possible to remove either drive and still boot up without problems?
I've already done with Dual Boot Windows XP and Windows 7. Initially i created 75GB of Raw partition when XP was installed.
1. When I goto XP my OS folder location is C:Windows and Windows 7 folder location I:Windows 2. When I go to Windows 7 my OS drive is C:Windows and Windows XP drive is D:Windows....
Currently, I'm not facing any problems, But wanted to know how & why its happening like that...??
I'd like to set up two separate Windows 7 installations on my computer. I don't know whether this is possible, I know I can set up a dual-boot environment with an older version of Windows or Ubuntu. I have an OEM version of Windows 7 - is it possible to have the computer prompt me for which drive to boot?
My hard drive crashed. Bought a new one. Cloned another hard drive onto it. Old computer won't recognize the cloned drive but does in BIOS. I think the CPU was destroyed while cleaning the dust because it has prongs that clamped down and I couldn't see exactly where the gold pins were going to set in. Was very careful, but either the CPU is bad or the mother board is bad. Tested all other components in the working computer. Battery is fine. New cloned hard drive is fine. So I installed the cloned drive as a second OS drive in the working computer.I now have to share the computer with my husband until I get a new CPU or MB for my better, more expensive computer.Is it possible for him to log into "his" computer using "his" 1TB Sata HD, and then for me to come along and log into the cloned drive in his computer (2TB Sata HD) and do all of my work from that drive, so that when my own computer gets fixed, I'll have all the files I've worked on and programs installed that only I need on it and ready for use in my own computer, taking it out of my husband's computer after mine is fixed?
I'm sure I can go into BIOS and change the boot order whenever either one of us sits down to use the computer, but he's not going to want to do that each time, being pretty much computer illiterate as he is. Is there some other way to do a user switch easily during any time of the day when we need to share his computer?.
I have a M2010 running Windows 7 ultimate using raid. I was wondering if I put in a hd in the secondary spot if I could add XP Pro and dual boot. I have some things that work better under XP. I put my old laptop drive in and set the bios raid to auto detect/ata. It booted to 7 and installed drive E:. I didn't change any Matrix software settings so it's a raid/non raid setup.
I know at this point it's tricky and i should have done it before installing Windows 7 however...My new physical primary drive now has Windows 7 pro running exclusively the whole partition (cI'd like to add the drive that had XP pro running on the same PC.i'd like to get this running as a duel boot without corrupting the XP drive.
I have RAID 0 on two hardrives booting up 64 bit Win 7 running as SATA 0 and SATA 1.I have a third drive on SATA 2 from my previous Dell XPS which booted 32 bit Windows XP. How can I set up the system to give me a choice of either system?lthough Win 7 64 bit is faster, many of the 32 bit XP software programs will not run very well on Win 7 and in addition Win 7 doesn't allow the setting of of shortcuts the way XP does which means that Win 7 inevitably requires two key strokes to XP's one stroke.
1st. Installed XP on IDE drive, 2nd. installed a Sata drive, installed Windows 7 on that drive, want to remove the IDE drive, is it as simple as disconnecting the XP drive and do a startup repair, or is there going to be an issue with the XP drive being the Active drive, will startup repair make the Sata drive the Active drive?
