2 hard drives, 2 os's, one computer?

[Eddie Haskell]

I know this can be accomplished just not sure how to access each OS.
I installed XP pro on a hard drive in my present computer and when I was satisfied that all was well I removed that drive and set it aside. I then installed another drive and loaded up Windows 7 64 bit. I then reinstalled the XP drive and the computer doesn't seem to see the XP, it sees the drive and I can access files and move files to and fro but...
Bottom line is I have 2 complete OS's on 2 differnt drives but I'm not sure how to make the machine give me a choice of which OS to boot, by default it boots the Win 7.
Thanks for any direction you can offer.

 

[Ceth]

When your computer is starting up, you should almost instantly hit it's BIOS key. It may be different based on who the manufacturer was, but most commonly is F8, F10 or F11. Now because the operating systems are both on hard drives, the only way you can work this is Dual Booting, but there still may be an option to give you a choice. If not, your best bet is that in the BIOS you may have the ability to choose which drive (and thus, which OS) will be loaded first. Set it for XP's drive. When your computer's loading and detects the other drive, you should have a moment (a somewhat short one) to decide which OS to use.

 

[Ryan_Fpv]

I have my machine set up with Win7 on 1 HDD (F3) and XP on another (Barracuda). All you need to do is when the machine is starting up and you see the motherboard screen, press Del to enter the bios, go into advance options and set the boot priority to hard drive and then choose which hard drive is your primary boot drive. This will be the drive that will load by default each time you turn your machine on. If you want to switch into the other OS, simply press F12 on the motherboard screen when you're booting up. This will take you into the boot options, select Hard Drive, and then select which hard drive you want to boot from. When you restart your PC, it will load back into your default hard drive.

Oh, just a tip, if you want to access your files on the other drive from the other drive/OS, you might want to partition one of the drives or set up a shared folder, windows 7 can be a real b**** when it comes to trying to copying files from another HDD which has an OS installed on it, damn permission crap.

 

[FXB]

Install a boot manager like grub loader. it gives you an interface that allows you to choose which OS to boot.

 

[johnb35]

If you would have kept the XP drive in the system while installing Windows 7, it would have given you a dual boot menu when booting up. But as said now, you will need to install a boot loader and use that unless you want to reinstall windows 7 again with the XP drive attached.