Thinking Of Making My System Dual Boot.... Any Advice???

Guys,

Got the following system,

AMD Athlon 4800+ Dual Core
2Gb Crucial Ballistix DDR400 Ram
3 x 250GB Samsung Spinpoint P120's SATA II HD's
Dfi Lanparty nF4 UT Sli-D Motherboard

Looking to create a Dual Boot system (both drives with Windows XP).
In theory and with a little research I am guessing that it's just a case of installing windows on 2 HD's and then when the system starts up it should allow you to select which you want to boot from???

Any advice or tips would be greatly welcomed by those with a little more knowledge on this subject than me lol

Cheers, Nate

1) why would you wanna make your system dual boot for the SAME OS? I dont understand your theory behind this. If I had the capabilities, i would make my system boot between win 2000 and xp (cuz i hate XP).

2) Yes, you will be able to chose which installation drive you boot from at start-up. It would be kind of difficult to understand, tho, because it doesnt say WHICH drive you're booting from, it just says which OS you are booting from...

and...you'll need to set the proper boot drive info in your bios, cuz it could just boot to for example the "c" drive all the time, and you never get the option to choose.

hope this helps

peace
- computer geek

issues wrote:1) why would you wanna make your system dual boot for the SAME OS? I dont understand your theory behind this. If I had the capabilities, i would make my system boot between win 2000 and xp (cuz i hate XP).

Want a dedicated drive for music programs / software, i.e Reason 3.0, Sound Forge 8.0 and Pro Tools LE 7. No internet, no nothing, just Music.

Heard that things should run a bit better with no interferance / programs running in the backgroupd like Firewalls etc.

Thanks for the other advice re the boot up screen, guess it will be kinda hit or miss choosing which I want to boot though if I have 2x XP installed Is there a way around this at all?

Thanks again, Nate

alot of people do do this. It is a good way to keep the internet seperate. I just had a lot of virus issues that nuked both my pcs, but im back now. I gotta have the net though cause in the mid of a beat i always do a lil surfing. U can just choose at the bios boot screen what to load first, i think its like f10 or f12 when its booting.

What about using the internet to find samples? do you download mp3s? Keep that in mind.

I personally would go with 2 harddrives no matter what.

anyway you set your computer up, I think you should back your shit up to an external harddrive or cd..........just in case.

you might as well make it both XP and linux mandrake or redhat

mandrake is that shiznit

i have a dual xp boot system. you can pm me if you have questions, but it's pretty straight forward.

i have a music xp/everything else xp. one hd partitioned in two, 2 160gb hd's for stuff. the "music" xp is tweaked for music, everything not needed is disabled (usb, network, firewire etc), no software beyond music, no anti-virus etc. works good, slowtools has crashed once in the last 1,5 years and that was due to my mistake.

Eemo1 wrote:i have a dual xp boot system. you can pm me if you have questions, but it's pretty straight forward.

i have a music xp/everything else xp. one hd partitioned in two, 2 160gb hd's for stuff. the "music" xp is tweaked for music, everything not needed is disabled (usb, network, firewire etc), no software beyond music, no anti-virus etc. works good, slowtools has crashed once in the last 1,5 years and that was due to my mistake.

Nice one mate, I may take you up on the offer of advice once I back my current system up.

As you say it should be pretty straight forward but I am sure I will run into one or two little problems along the way lol

just install one xp and then install again to the other partition. it SHOULD make a menu automatically for the two xp's at startup.

do it man!

AMG wrote:do it man!

Its gonna happen.......

Tonight is phase one....... backing up s*** dam thats gonna be boring lol

do I need to buy a seperate harddrive to do this, or can I just split the one I already have?

i recommend a saparate hard drive...cuz splitting or partitioning into two is a very bad idea

never ever partition anything that is important to you...sometimes windows gets bitchy and decides to not recognise partitons

just a warning

Dude !!

Its a great idea, I have done this my self.

I have 2 Physical HDD's 160GIG and 200GIG

1st Has 4 Partitions

C: Normal XP OS (Admin, Internet etc)
D: DAW XP OS
E: My Production HDD (I store all my made beats, samples, chops etc mostly MPC stuff)
F: Music Software (This is where Cubase, Live Plugins etc is.)

2nd HDD is for AUDIO ONLY, where I use cubase to store all the vocals and recorded stuff.

The D Drive is works with the E, F drives, though accessible from both OS's

The advantages of this, the DAW OS has less background processes making it more smoother and faster running.
I tried runing cubase sx 3 on my normal C drive and it choked out!! i got alot of spikes and glitcy sounds in my recording. This is because the Network Card and other pci stuff was running with my Soundcard.

This is not a good thing and needs to be disabled. (along with loads of background stuff like System Restore, Firewall etc.)

The only downside to seperating all this is your registry can get problems if u reinstall XP. So to fix this, install everything working properly then use Norton Ghost on your OS partiton. this way it will have a working snapshot of ya drive.

Since i have installed things this way it has been runing rock solid since may. when i built the PC.