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General discussion

Installing duel hard drives

Jun 24, 2005 9:23PM PDT

This might sound stupid but I was wondering if it is possible to instal two hard drives which run independantly. I am sick of spyware and bugs with music download programs etc. and would like to run all my day to day stuff on a seperate drive and hopefully not get infected.

Discussion is locked

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Fairly easy
Jun 24, 2005 9:46PM PDT

You need an OS on each drive and the ability to select the boot drive from BIOS. I do this on one of my systems. I have Win2K on one and XP on another. I don't think MS will let you put XP on both drives using the same product ID, however. When you boot the machine, you just enter the BIOS to determine which drive you wish to boot from. You can put them on one IDE port or separate ones. If you have SATA, of course, these are separate channels. Hope this helps.

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dual boot
Jun 25, 2005 12:17AM PDT

you can create a partition on one fair sized HD and run 2 different os's. at boot with XP or 2000 or Linux you then would simply select which one to go to.

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(NT) (NT) this could also work with 2 hard drives
Jun 25, 2005 12:18AM PDT
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duel boot
Jun 25, 2005 9:30AM PDT

I would be running XP does creating partitions seperate the drives so if I got a virus it would only effect one partition or would they both get infected. I could keep information/files I would like to save on both partitions but only use one for music downloads and all that other naughty stuff.

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A virus can infect any magnetic media
Jun 25, 2005 10:00PM PDT

on the PC regardless of how it's partitioned. It depends on how the virus operates. I'd say, however, that overall data security is slightly better using separate drives rather than partitions on the same drive. If they are large enough you can duplicate critical data on both and a hard disk failure of one drive will mean your data can be retrieved from the other. Either way you do this, an extra step will be needed when you boot the PC.

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I have never had
Jun 26, 2005 1:17AM PDT

a virus YET, infect the other partition and, I have had to deal with plenty. Having a 13 year old.