How to dual boot XP from a drive from another computer.

July 10, 2006 6:39 AM

Can I dual boot from an XP drive that came from older (dead) computer?

My friend's girlfriend's computer died last week. The machine won't boot up and it looks like the mainboard is fried. My friend would like to swop the working hard drive from the dead computer into his Dell and create a dual boot scenario where he can load either operating system e.g. "Load My Windows XP Pro" or "Load Girlfriend's Windows XP Pro". I know you can connect the old drive as a slave and see it in Windows explorer, but is the dual boot scenario possible?

posted by DZ-015 to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Connect the old drive as a slave or whatnot, and then when the computer boots, get into BIOS and change the boot order of the drives to make the newly inserted drive boot first. Windows will probably panic because itll be dealing with all new hardware (you might only be able to boot in safe mode). When you want to go back to the other OS, change the boot order back in BIOS. Optionally, if you have linux installed you can edit your lilo.conf, or you can even edit your main XP installs' boot.ini and add an entry for the drive.
posted by Mach5 at 6:50 AM on July 10, 2006

I'm wondering why you want to dual boot in this situation.

I wouldn't try to run the old windows installation in a new machine. It will work, but as Mach5 said, there will be hardware issues and you might only get into safe mode. Really, I would only do this to try and save data before a format and reinstall.

Setting up the drive as a slave will let you do this just fine though, you will have complete access to everything on the drive once you've claimed ownership of it.

The dual boot scenario seems like more effort for less payoff, unless there is some other advantage to it that I am not seeing?
posted by utsutsu at 7:15 AM on July 10, 2006

I really strongly suspect that trying to have two bootable XP drives in the same machine simply will not work properly at all, though I couldn't provide specific reasons why it will break (I cross-deck such questions to my Windows Guy at work, who typically provides the specific reasons :-).

I agree, just mount GF's drive as a secondary, and pull the data off it you want, or replace the machine under it, and go through Driver (and Activation) Hell *once*.
posted by baylink at 9:43 AM on July 10, 2006