Two Operating systems in one PC

[Benzowner]

Just from curiosity, what would happen if you took the harddrive out of a PC with say Windows XP and put it into a computer with Vista, or Windows 98 into an XP machine as a second hard drive? Would the old hard drive still operate with the old system or would there be a severe conflict.

 

[ms500]

Just from curiosity, what would happen if you took the harddrive out of a PC with say Windows XP and put it into a computer with Vista, or Windows 98 into an XP machine as a second hard drive? Would the old hard drive still operate with the old system or would there be a severe conflict.

Depending how you connected the drives, the PC would boot the OS from the master HD and the OS should detect the other disk as a second hard drive.

 

[Ted]

Assuming it is set as a secondary or slave you would boot into the old operating system, and I would expect to see the drive with all its files as say a 'D' or 'E' drive.

I've just been doing some work with RHEL 5 and been virtualising some servers - running Redhat7.3, and other operating systems under control of the native o/s.
Now THAT is seriously interesting!

 

[Inkyskin]

Which ever drive is set as primary (Either on the cable or by jumper) will boot first.

To get either to boot from an option screen requires one OS to be installed first, and then the second OS installed afterwords - this will update the Master Boot Record and enable the multi choice on boot.

You could just shove the drive in though, and set which one you want to boot from the BIOS if you only use one on the odd occasion. Just change in the bios if you feel the need to use it.

 

[Sp!ke]

Yes and no.

In theory you could just edit the boot.ini to allow you to boot off either disk.

However the likelihood is that the hardware differences between an old single core XP machine will prevent it from booting on the new platform without some significant fiddling. Will the new machine even accept an IDE drive (I'm guessing that the XP machine is IDE)

I wouldnt bother, I'd use the XP CD that came with the old machine and wipe Vista completely for a faster more reliable, and better computer experience. If you insist on Vista but want the option of your XP image, you could virtualise the XP image and run it within vista.

 

[Nibbo]

Removed.

 

[stevesey]

On a similar vein I have a machine (two in fact) set up with two hard drives, both with a 15GB boot partition on them containing XP + applications. The rest of the drives are partitioned for documents/music/videos, both XPs are set up identically (ghosted in fact). If I have a problem I think is a windows issue I boot from the other drive to check it out (and then ghost it back to the original when I'm happy).

 

[Sp!ke]

Sounds like overkill. How often do you break XP?

Personally I'd detach the hot spare when not in use as a powerspike or PSU failure could kill both drives together.

 

[crockers]

Going off on a tangent but along the same lines..

It is possible now to run windows vista on a MAC with parallels or boot camp etc -- is it possible to do the reverse -- run MAC OS on a windows computer ??

 

[agatward]

Going off on a tangent but along the same lines..

It is possible now to run windows vista on a MAC with parallels or boot camp etc -- is it possible to do the reverse -- run MAC OS on a windows computer ??

Yes but technically not legally - there's a clause in the Apple software license about only running on Apple hardware. See http://www.osx86project.org/ for more details - link provided for educational purposes only.

 

[whitenemesis]

This weekend I upgraded my PC ram to 4GB, installed a second, bigger HDD and am now running Vista Ultimate as host OS and with XP as guest OS running in a virtual machine.

Seems to be working very well (so far).....

Seems a simple way to run two or more OSs simultaneously with easy switching between them.

 

[WLeg]

I've been looking at putting OSX on my Vostro - apparantly this is possible...anyone got the recommended software from the above link ?
(I've got VIsta and OS X).

 

[agatward]

I've used it for running OS X in a VmWare virtual machine, but not on 'raw' hardware. Seems to work fine - a friend of mine has also used it for installing OS X on his Acer laptop - took about 2 hours to install though!