Dual Boot TWO Vista OS's on TWO hard drives

D

DavidJay2011

New Member
How can I dual boot TWO instances of Vista Business from TWO separate hard drives? - My wife's Dell Vostro 1710 has had to be been returned to Dell, I have installed her Vostro hard drive in my IDENTICAL Dell Vostro 1710, but I don't get a dual boot menu when I power up my Vostro 1710. (Both Vista Business OSs are licensed, separately).

I would like to boot her hard drive so that it looks like 'her' desktop on 'her' computer.


- My machine boots to MY OS if both hard drives are enabled.



- BUT - if I disable MY hard drive and leave HERS enabled, I just get a black screen 'memory' error and an instruction to insert the Windows repair disk.

Thanks for any advice.
 

My Computer

System One

  • Manufacturer/Model
    Dell Vostro 1710
Just so you know, there is always one primary hard drive and one or more slave drives on a given computer. The primary HD has the master boot record referenced by the CMOS. If you switch drives like you're doing, it obviously doesn't work because the proper master boot record is not found.

You definitely need to use a boot manager program of some kind, like the one patch41 suggested. There are many choices out there, so I would do some research first before jumping into this, as each program has it's own reliability track record and capabilities.
 

My Computer

System One

  • Manufacturer/Model
    HP Pavillion dv5t
    CPU
    Intel Core Duo 2.53GHz
    Memory
    4Gb
    Graphics card(s)
    NVidia GeForce 9600M GT 512Mb
    Screen Resolution
    1280x800 32bit
    Hard Drives
    Seagate Momentus XT 500Gb Hitachi Travelstar HTS543225L9A300 250Gb
    Mouse
    Microsoft 4000
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