Multi-booting on two seperate hard drives

Okay, I've had a good look round the old interweb and most multi-boot tutorials or whatever you might call them are totally aimied at partinioned, single, hard drives.



But I will be running a dual-boot system on two seperate hard drives!



For the first time ever I will be receiving a computer in its rawest form, i.e. nothing installed. I won't know exactly where to start - especially considering I will need to set up the dual-boot system. So what will I have to do the first time I plug my new machine in? And how do I set up a multi-boot system, with the same copy of the same operating system on the two hard drives?



Thanks!

The dual-boot will be for home recording/gaming. I understand on the recording side of things that you want to keep the OS as sparse as possible to acheive maximum speed. How is this acheived?

If my mind serves me right, users want a multi boot system to have dual operating system. If you want the same OS, that's not called a dual boot OS.On the other hand, I have two hard drive in the house and each hard drive has windows XP pro and when I slave the other, it still not giving the option on where to boot because they are just the same.

Well, what I would like is Windows XP on each hard drive, with the option to boot to one or the other when I turn the computer on.How would I go about this?

thats because you haven't set up dual boot.



you need to install the os to each of the hard drive, if you've done that already you need to set up a boot menu, edit the boot.ini file of the master drive (the drive will be set to master, and will be the one that always seems to boot)

you boot.ini should look something like



[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect



obviously change the name of the os if you running 2 versions of home.



Personally i think you may be going over kill. WHy not just set up different users on the same os?

If I'm running simply the OS and my DAW and no unneeded drivers/applications on one hard drive, it will reduce latency to a bare minimum, which I believe is the main issue when recording to a hard drive.

what are you recording from. A lot of the stuff done on you daw will be handled on the sound card, and anyway its hardly the most cpu intense task in world.

Audiophile 2496 soundcard. In my experience it can be a very intensive task if you have many tracks, I'd imagine even the most up to date computers wouldnt be able to handle more than 100 tracks with plug-in effects (which add an extra load on the computer), although obviously I won't be having that many! But nonetheless, my computer at the moment cant handle more then about 10 tracks anymore, so I just want to be sure that my computer will be able to record effectively long into the future, which i can guarentee more if i know that there will be no extra crap working its way onto my hard drive.

Maybe I should explain a little better. It's not just the case of recording onto the hard drive. It's a case of the computer being able to handle manipulation of say 15-20 wavs of about 50mb each, adding effects to them etc, and being able to play them all at once, and mixing them down into the finished product (a song). from experience this does seem to take a heavy toll on the computer.