O/T 2 hard drives and 2 operating systems, dual bo

If your wanting to both be on at the same time then I would look at using seperate puters with wireless/wired router with a network admin. Trying to use just one puter for two people at the same time takes alot of additional ram and CPU from one machine.

If your just wanting to sperate the kids off of your files/programs then use the XP admin with user feature. I use this myself even tho I'm the only one on my puter as this keeps all my main files/programs away from the internet but lets me surf the net without corrupting my files. The user can not make very many changes without Admin's approval and what changes the user can make does not effect the admin account.

I did have to use the stand alone XP home OS (SP2) as it has more control over the XP OS system VS using XP with Toshibia control.

I haven't used any anit-virus in 4yrs as that caused me more grief than using it, Norton, McFee or Symantic. I have not had any type of problems set up this way as my ISP uses a great anti-virus program for me.

My sensitive data files are kept off line on a seperate USB HDD that has a off/on power switch and are password protected. I keep a CD/DVD back-up copy of this HDD.

Works for me anywho!

T_Bone

If you're trying to keep the kids out of your files you probably won't accomplish it this way, both hard drives will probably still be visible from both operating systems.

If all you really want is to secure some files from the kids, learn how to use the security features built into every operating system. Create separate user accounts, lock down the permissions to the folders, and make sure the kids don't have the administrator password. That will be much more secure than what you're trying to do. And please don't say you're running Windows on the default Admin account today!

Like Gerald, I've run multiple boot in the past, but only with Linux, O/S2, and DOS. The current Linux boot loader, GRUB, does an excellent job of booting multiple operating systems, but I suspect any Windows install will try to wipe it out.

Generally speaking, you can only set up one hard drive in your BIOS as the boot device. Even if you can set up two boot devices, you would have to go into BIOS and change your boot order around every time you want to switch drives. That's entirely too much aggravation.

What you need is a boot loader. The boot loader is a small program that tells the computer which disk partition to boot to. Typically all of your partitions are on the same physical disk. I know the Linux boot loader doesn't require all bootable partitions to be on the same physical drive, but I think the Windows boot loader might. Which means you will probably need to repartition your disk, which will usually wipe out all the data on the disk.

I switched to Linux over ten years ago and never looked back. Everyone in the house has their own account, and nobody (except me) can do anything to trash the computer. No, I can't run all that Windows software, but I don't have to deal with viruses, spyware and similar problems.

• Microsoft multiple boot instructions

Some of the newer, advanced BIOS setups will let you do this, but it is a tricky thing to be messing with.

"Usually", if you want the two drives/systems to be totally and truly blind from each other, you have to use a third party script to re-write the boot sector of one drive, which will force the machine to initally get down under it's own BIOS function like Ken says.

That's all well and good until it comes time to get it off of there and believe me, that time will come. Then, we start having fun because writing a boot sector to zeros isn't the easiest thing to do and takes a special utility.

Much easier to just run a dual profile which boots to one or the other OS and let the two drives function normally. Very easy to do, just reinsert your setup disc while the system is up and running, it will then ask you if you want a dual boot.

Simplier yet is to just log on as two different "users". The OS will "blind" the other user.

Allan

make sense????? ???

John T

In this computer, I'm runing Fedora Core 3 which is Linux and OS/2 and dual booting using the grub boot control from Fedora Core 3. I have other computers dual booting Fedora Core 3 and MS-DOS-5.0 with the same software.

If you want to use windoze in both drives, it won't let you because it will search out all the drive partitions it can read and claim them as its own which makes it hard to dual boot DOS and windoze.

There is commercial multi booting software called "System Commander" that is quite capable except it can't keep windoze out of DOS partitions and trying to boot two copies of windoze they would grab each other's drive partitions.

But at least with Linux and recent windoze (like XP) you can set up multiple users and give each user permissions to access only their portion of the computer and whatever common programs they need to run. Each user has to sign on at the beginning with user name and password. This is automatically a requirement in Linux but can be put into windoze though I haven't done it. The time when I find someone else using my computer, I'll have a thief in the house and there will be more than a little strife. Anyway by that scheme you can set up a portion of the drive space for kids, and a separate portion for yourself and also give yourself supreme power to go inspect their portion to be sure they are always being good. Such setup should be covered in windoze documentation, either on the drive or in the many books on using windoze XP.

Gerald J.

Take care n stay warm yall

John T

You install vmware on top of your current os.....then build a virtual machine....so you can run xp on one machine, linux on another, sun solaris on another, windows 2000 on another, or have multiple instances of xp loaded..... .

read the overview at:

http://www.vmware.com/

Gerald J.