I have a 80GB HD that is just sitting around so what I would like to do is set up my system to dual boot either Windows 7 twice or Windows 7 and XP.
My plan is that the smaller HD will be for my wife to use or me to use and not have to worry about what sites either of us are going to. She is always getting pop ups and malware that is taking over her laptop and about a month ago I clicked on a link to a giant trebuchet pumpkin launcher and I ended up on this german site that did show me an awesome pumpkin chucker but I think I also got some malware.
Will this plan work as far as keeping any malware from moving to the other HD or is that shit at the point where it is getting into everything no matter what I do.
Dual boot question.
You would have to hide the partitions from each other. That should keep things from crossing over.
By default, most dual boots will have the nonactive partition showing up as extended storage. As a D: drive, or what ever drive letter made sense. If you hide the partition, then the OS doesn't see it and can't write to it.
I started looking into boot programs, but didn't take it far enough to act on it. I did find a good partition manager, but that's it so far. When I reload my system the next time, I'll be setting it up to dual boot.
Or I'll be building another system all together to dual boot test/learning OSes. In either case, I'll post my findings here. Please do the same!
By default, most dual boots will have the nonactive partition showing up as extended storage. As a D: drive, or what ever drive letter made sense. If you hide the partition, then the OS doesn't see it and can't write to it.
I started looking into boot programs, but didn't take it far enough to act on it. I did find a good partition manager, but that's it so far. When I reload my system the next time, I'll be setting it up to dual boot.
Or I'll be building another system all together to dual boot test/learning OSes. In either case, I'll post my findings here. Please do the same!
Just installing the second drive and dual-booting into it is not guaranteed safe. Technically anything that infects one drive could also write itself to the other. However in actual practice it'd probably be very close to 100% safe. Very few if any viruses/trojans/etc are going to look at that second drive. It would take something more like a classic worm, and there aren't many of those around these days.
If you do want to be 100% safe you'd need to go into the setup of the second (unsafe) boot and make it so that it can't even see that the primary drive exists. I've never tried to do it, but maybe there's a way to uninstall the primary drive in the secondary installation and make it completely inaccessible.
EDIT: You may not be able to block things two ways. At a minimum the boot loader on the primary would need to see the existence of the secondary. Presuming you would be using the Windows boot manager, it may be awkward to try to block the first drive from seeing the second. Now if you went with something like grub, then it could certainly work both ways, but I wouldn't recommend playing with grub without also have Linux involved to fix it with.
Edited By TPRJones on 1269646609
If you do want to be 100% safe you'd need to go into the setup of the second (unsafe) boot and make it so that it can't even see that the primary drive exists. I've never tried to do it, but maybe there's a way to uninstall the primary drive in the secondary installation and make it completely inaccessible.
EDIT: You may not be able to block things two ways. At a minimum the boot loader on the primary would need to see the existence of the secondary. Presuming you would be using the Windows boot manager, it may be awkward to try to block the first drive from seeing the second. Now if you went with something like grub, then it could certainly work both ways, but I wouldn't recommend playing with grub without also have Linux involved to fix it with.
Edited By TPRJones on 1269646609
"ATTENTION: Customers browsing porn must hold magazines with both hands at all times!"
Has anyone actually ever done a dual boot with two hard drives?
I have been reading some forums and I am seeing people say that it is impossible to use boot loaders and to dual boot if you are using two different hard drives. You can only do it by partitioning one hard drive.
This might help explain why two week later I am still no closer to a dual boot PC.
I have been reading some forums and I am seeing people say that it is impossible to use boot loaders and to dual boot if you are using two different hard drives. You can only do it by partitioning one hard drive.
This might help explain why two week later I am still no closer to a dual boot PC.
I'm dual-booting with two hard drives, one operating system on each, no problems.
EDIT: In fact, I've successfully done it two different ways now that I think about it. One using grub with a Linux installation, and then more recently with Windows 7 using the MBR. I know less about the details of how and why that second one is working (Windows 7 just did it automatically, but I did lay it down on top of the prior grub so that may have given it a head start), but if that's what you are trying to do I can dig into my MBR and see what exactly is in there.
Edited By TPRJones on 1270770472
EDIT: In fact, I've successfully done it two different ways now that I think about it. One using grub with a Linux installation, and then more recently with Windows 7 using the MBR. I know less about the details of how and why that second one is working (Windows 7 just did it automatically, but I did lay it down on top of the prior grub so that may have given it a head start), but if that's what you are trying to do I can dig into my MBR and see what exactly is in there.
Edited By TPRJones on 1270770472
"ATTENTION: Customers browsing porn must hold magazines with both hands at all times!"
I used easydcb and when I choose 7 everything seems to go fine except that I can see the other drive but I have not tried to do anything about that yet. When I choose XP I get an error that mentions
TLDR and 0xc000000f.
Google is saying that they needed to be repaired for XP to work but I never see anything about dual booting in those threads.
TLDR and 0xc000000f.
Google is saying that they needed to be repaired for XP to work but I never see anything about dual booting in those threads.
Okay, so Windows 7 doesn't do things anything like XP. I found something that will probably help: EasyBCD
I loaded it up and checked to see what it says my current setup is. I've got Windows 7 on my main drive, and my old Windows XP on my secondary drive. Here's what that looks like in EasyBCD:
Does that help at all?
I loaded it up and checked to see what it says my current setup is. I've got Windows 7 on my main drive, and my old Windows XP on my secondary drive. Here's what that looks like in EasyBCD:
There are a total of 2 entries listed in the Vista Bootloader.
Bootloader Timeout: 5 seconds.
Default OS: Windows 7
Entry #1
Name: Earlier Version of Windows
BCD ID: {ntldr}
Drive: D:\
Bootloader Path:
tldr
Entry #2
Name: Windows 7
BCD ID: {current}
Drive: C:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe
Windows Directory: \Windows
Does that help at all?
"ATTENTION: Customers browsing porn must hold magazines with both hands at all times!"
It looks like there needs to be some stuff on the XP drive that wasn't there before I put in Windows 7. Here's a snapshot my my root directory on the second drive. I have no idea which files are necessary and which are extra fluff. I did the Windows 7 installation on 3/17, so it's likely the four highlighted files were created or edited during that process and need to be there for booting to work:
If any of these are something you don't have and you'd like me to dig into it more, let me know.
If any of these are something you don't have and you'd like me to dig into it more, let me know.
"ATTENTION: Customers browsing porn must hold magazines with both hands at all times!"
What steps did you take? You don't need to tell me each key stroke but I have done clean installs with only one HD connected at a time, clean installs with both connected, I have started up the pc with no 3rd party boot programs and with third party boot program and the only thing I can get to work is using the easybcd after clean installs but like I said XP does not work. It gives me the choice of which to boot though.
It appears that the choice is just a lable that easybcd puts up and not an actual drive being seen.
It appears that the choice is just a lable that easybcd puts up and not an actual drive being seen.
Well, I got here in a very roundabout way.
Way back when I had just Windows XP installed. Then I put on some Linux partitions, at which point grub was installed as my boot loader (in the first Linux partition - second on the drive - but with XP as the default to load). Later on I decided to go straight Linux, so I moved that drive to the second spot and reinstalled Linux Mint onto a new drive all alone (so still grub, with XP on drive two as a choice to load).
Finally when I decided to give up on Linux I installed Windows 7 on top of it. XP is still the secondary drive, and from the very beginning it set up XP as a secondary loading choice and has been working with no extra tweaking at all. Given the problems you are having, my guess is that it must have taken some information that was already laid down previously by grub to make this work right. Either that or having XP as a secondary on grub meant it was already set up to run properly as the secondary itself when I finally got to where I am now. It depends on if the problem you are having ends up being something wrong with the Windows 7 loader setup or something missing on your XP install.
Of course, this is probably no help to you at all.
Edited By TPRJones on 1270773729
Way back when I had just Windows XP installed. Then I put on some Linux partitions, at which point grub was installed as my boot loader (in the first Linux partition - second on the drive - but with XP as the default to load). Later on I decided to go straight Linux, so I moved that drive to the second spot and reinstalled Linux Mint onto a new drive all alone (so still grub, with XP on drive two as a choice to load).
Finally when I decided to give up on Linux I installed Windows 7 on top of it. XP is still the secondary drive, and from the very beginning it set up XP as a secondary loading choice and has been working with no extra tweaking at all. Given the problems you are having, my guess is that it must have taken some information that was already laid down previously by grub to make this work right. Either that or having XP as a secondary on grub meant it was already set up to run properly as the secondary itself when I finally got to where I am now. It depends on if the problem you are having ends up being something wrong with the Windows 7 loader setup or something missing on your XP install.
Of course, this is probably no help to you at all.
Edited By TPRJones on 1270773729
"ATTENTION: Customers browsing porn must hold magazines with both hands at all times!"
No it helps in the sense that these other blogs and forums saying that there is only one way to get a dual boot working are full of shit. Big suprise someone on the internet is a moron.TPRJones wrote:Of course, this is probably no help to you at all.
The problem is me and the settings it is just figuring out what settings.
Oh! I forgot something! When I first installed Windows 7 it wouldn't boot right. Well, sort of. When the installation disk was still in the drive it booted from the hard disk just fine - and this is without selecting "Boot from CD" - but when the disk was out it failed to boot at all. I dug back through my browser history and found what it was I then did. At least part of it. And maybe this will be something that will help you, too.
Put in your Windows 7 boot disk and boot up from it. Once in setup, choose repair console from the first screen (not install). The last option should get you to a DOS prompt.
The program you want to use is called bootrec.exe. I don't think it was in the root folder, I think I had to dig around to find it. And I don't remember exactly what I did with it, but I was able to use it to fix the MBR so that Windows 7 would boot. It's possible that doing this also made the XP partition boot properly, too.
Unfortunately I don't remember at all what I did with it. I'm sure I didn't explicitly tell it about XP at any point, though, because I was just focusing on fixing Windows 7 at that point. Here's an article here that I read at some point in this process that explains this tool: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392
Let me know how it goes!
Edited By TPRJones on 1270779175
Put in your Windows 7 boot disk and boot up from it. Once in setup, choose repair console from the first screen (not install). The last option should get you to a DOS prompt.
The program you want to use is called bootrec.exe. I don't think it was in the root folder, I think I had to dig around to find it. And I don't remember exactly what I did with it, but I was able to use it to fix the MBR so that Windows 7 would boot. It's possible that doing this also made the XP partition boot properly, too.
Unfortunately I don't remember at all what I did with it. I'm sure I didn't explicitly tell it about XP at any point, though, because I was just focusing on fixing Windows 7 at that point. Here's an article here that I read at some point in this process that explains this tool: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392
Let me know how it goes!
Edited By TPRJones on 1270779175
"ATTENTION: Customers browsing porn must hold magazines with both hands at all times!"