Dual Boot Question

[chunkylover53]

My current setup is 2x SATA HDD in RAID_0 with Vista 64bit, 1x SATA for data, 2x SATA optical drives.

Let's say I have an extra IDE hard drive lying around, and I want to run a completely separate OS from that IDE drive, like Windows 7 RC or teach myself linux. I don't want to partition the current array I have Vista running off of. I want that other OS to be on it's own hard drive so that any changes/errors I make won't have any effect on the 3 SATA HDD drives.

Can I just install the IDE drive, install a boot manager, and load the OS on the IDE drive? Will booting from the IDE drive still give me access to the other SATA drives?

[The Wise Monkey]

Yes. :D

Just make sure you know exactly which drive you are working on at each time as you really don't want to overwrite your current stuff by mistake.

[chunkylover53]

Cool. To that point, is there any easy way to "hide" the other HDD's while I'm in the second OS, and vice versa? If I was conected to a server I could just not conect to those drives. Any way of doing it with all local hard drives?

[The Wise Monkey]

If you are using Linux, you can unmount them from the root using umount in the terminal, or via a file explorer. For Windows, you can go into Device Manager and uninstall the hard drives from your system.

For both systems, you can change the security settings so that you don't have write access to the other hard drives. Alternatively you could just unplug the drives that aren't in use, but that is a pain. :)