Two hard drives two different operating system?

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corvette93

New Member
can i install Two hard drives with two different operating system? if so how would it work when booting up? and how can it be done?
 
johnb35

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
Can only do that providing the OS was installed while in the system that you are wanting to put them in. You can't take drives from other systems and put them in yours and expect them to boot up due to different hardware and drivers. You can use them as storage drives but you can't boot to them.
 
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corvette93

New Member
if I install Windows operating systems on the same machine can I have two different boot up drives like Windows 10 and Windows XP?when the computer boots up how will it no which os to boot up
 
johnb35

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
You can do that. Install XP first then install 10 and you'll get a boot loader at the beginning of bootup asking you which OS you want to boot to. Or if you don't want to do that then you can install each OS on a different drive and boot to the bios and change boot priority depending on what OS you want. Why on earth would you want to have XP though? Its out of date and no longer supported.
 
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corvette93

New Member
thanks, i want xp cause i can run 2 of my programs: Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0 and Microsoft Picture It! Photo Premium 2002 they will not run on windows 10
 
beers

beers

Moderator
Staff member
Personally I'd just run XP in VMWare player or something. Then you can use both OS at the same time without having to reboot.
 
MisterEd

MisterEd

Member
You can use a boot loader program to allow you to have multiple operating systems. I use EasyBCD to do this. For example suppose you have Windows 7 installed on one drive. The you add another drive with Windows XP on it. To create a boot menu just run EasyBCD. You can then easily add a option to boot Windows XP also. When you boot with a boot loader menu you are given a menu to choose which operating system to load.

EasyBCD is not necessary if you install Windows XP first and then Windows 7 on a different partition or drive. The boot menu is created for you. Otherwise you need a program like EasyBCD to create the boot menu manually.

Note all operating systems must have been originally installed on that computer so that the drivers are correct. Also you don't have to install different operating systems on different drives. They just have to be in different partitions. For example on my laptop with one hard drive I have both Windows 7 and Windows 10 installed.

BTW, one time I had 3 or 4 operating systems at one time on a computer. Two were versions of Windows while the others were Linux. I just selected which one to load from the boot menu.

EasyBCD
http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/

Note EasyBCD is free for personal use.
 
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