How can I swap between Hard Drives on one Monitor? Please help?

[Kewicase]

Okay so I have 3 external hard drives and one laptop. I do have a OS on each of these external HD. How can I use one monitor (my main laptop) to switch over to each hard drive quickly like I run one task on my Windows 8 hard drive then jump over to my Windows 7 hard drive but doing it all on one screen? so I do not have to restart the computer and go into bios configure and then switch which hard drive to start up. How is this possible? Should I use a KVM for this? I need guidance

 

[strollin]

The only way you could accomplish what you want would be to setup Virtual Machines using software such as VirtualBox, VMWarePlayer or Hyper-V. It isn't necessary to have the different OSs on separate HDDs but it will work that way regardless. You will need to create each VM and then install the desired OS into that VM (there are utilities that will convert an existing OS partition into a virtual disk to use with a VM).

In order to run multiple VMs at the same time, your machine will need to have ample CPU, RAM and disk space since you will essentially be booting and running 3 OSs at the same time. For instance, if you wanted to run Win 7, Win 8 and Win 10 alll at the same time with 4GB of RAM each, you would need 12GB of RAM to support that.

A KVM won't work in this case since you would need 3 different computers running the 3 OSs. In that case, a KVM would allow you to share a monitor, keyboard and mouse between the 3 computers and switch rapidly between them.

 

[beers]

@strollin pretty much nailed it.

You can't have more than one active operating system without some kind of virtualization product or application.

What exactly are you doing that you need per OS segregation across three separate installations?

 

[Kewicase]

The only way you could accomplish what you want would be to setup Virtual Machines using software such as VirtualBox, VMWarePlayer or Hyper-V. It isn't necessary to have the different OSs on separate HDDs but it will work that way regardless. You will need to create each VM and then install the desired OS into that VM (there are utilities that will convert an existing OS partition into a virtual disk to use with a VM).

In order to run multiple VMs at the same time, your machine will need to have ample CPU, RAM and disk space since you will essentially be booting and running 3 OSs at the same time. For instance, if you wanted to run Win 7, Win 8 and Win 10 alll at the same time with 4GB of RAM each, you would need 12GB of RAM to support that.

A KVM won't work in this case since you would need 3 different computers running the 3 OSs. In that case, a KVM would allow you to share a monitor, keyboard and mouse between the 3 computers and switch rapidly between them.

Thank you!! Yes I am now using Hyper-V for this and saves so much physical space and time then what I was trying to figure out. Thanks for the info of the RAM!

@strollin pretty much nailed it.

You can't have more than one active operating system without some kind of virtualization product or application.

What exactly are you doing that you need per OS segregation across three separate installations?

don't laugh lol. But I've been trying to learn Windows Server 2012 and I was trying to run Windows Server on my main laptop and use the other external HDD "operating system" to control with my Windows Server. Now I know I can just create a VM running Windows Server on my Windows 10 laptop instead of actually installing Windows Server as my main Operating system.
Thanks for your replies you guys!

 

[beers]

No laughing needed, sounds like a nice lab to learn server roles and similar.

I also have a lab win2k12r2 server instance on my esxi VMware server

Any particular features you were looking to lab for or mainly AD?