How to tell machine which o/s disk to boot off?

R

Robert P

Member
An aggravating issue - if I have 2 sata drives that have different O/S's - say one is Win7 and the other is XP, I find it will boot off whichever was the most recent one it booted from. So if I want to have it boot off the XP drive because I want to format the Win7 drive, I have to boot up off the XP drive, shut down then attach the Win7 drive.

Is there a way to do this that doesn't require this process - i.e. is there a way to tell the machine which O/S drive I want to boot from?

Thanks
 
You can select the drive via the boot menu. When you turn the computer on, enter the temporary boot menu and select the hard drive that has the OS you want.
 
If you always want to start from a particular OS, you can go into the BIOS and change the hard drive boot order, then you can always enter the boot menu on startup to boot from the other drive.
 
You can always add a boot menu. I use EasyBCD.

For example suppose you boot up Windows 7 and install EasyBCD. When you run EasyBCD you can then add Windows XP to the boot menu. After you save and reboot you will see a menu that lets you select either Windows XP or Windows 7.

EasyBCD
http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1
 
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