Two Drives, dual boot Vista/Vista? bootmenu?

[robertpri]

I have done this many times with XP Pro. Two entirely different hard drives.

Make a dynamic file by file copy of C to D, then configure the boot menu to boot to either one.

So, if C should die, boot to identical D. Has saved me and business clents many times.

But alas, whatever is used as bootini in Vista seems a bit more difficult.

If I have two identical hard drives with the same vista OS, how do I configure the bootini menu to boot to either one?

many thanks

 

[Flavius]

To configure bootmgr in Vista is command bcdedit (command bcdedit /? display all options of these command) but simply and better way is to use EasyBCD ->Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies

 

[robertpri]

Many thanks! I have Partition Magic 9 which claims to have a boot manager option, and it does, but its' designed to create a new partition and then install a new os.

A great many steps,and not really what I want

thanks again

 

[Dwarf]

Hi Robert,

You might find this Tutorial useful: BCDEDIT - How to Use - Windows 7 Forums

 

[Klaudius]

You could just do the following, buy motherboards/pci card that support raid,(they arnt that expensive) and set up a RAID 1 drive system. Since the driver is in hardware you don't take a CPU performance hit.
Its wonderful and I have used it on many client machines.

Definition:

[FONT=tahoma,arial,helvetica,sansserif] RAID-1 [/FONT]
[FONT=tahoma,arial,helvetica,sansserif] RAID-1 provides data redundancy by writing the same information to two or more drives. The performance of a level 1 array tends to be faster on reads and slower on writes compared to a single drive configuration. However, if either drive fails in a level-1 array, no data is lost. This RAID level is commonly referred to as Mirroring. [/FONT]

The best part is instead of just being able to bring the machine online from a hard drive crash, all of the clients data is actually backed up automatically on the second disk, so they have no interruption of business.

All you need to do is remove the broken drive place in a new one and the hardware automatically moves the clients data onto the new drive. And you can do this while the client is using the machine.
>BAM< your back up and running with a live 100% backup.

 

[robertpri]

I have done RAID before, but this particular question was about my single hard drive laptop. I downloaded BCD as recommended from Falvius below.

I ran it and expected it to become my bootup screen menu, but it just keeps opening with the standard MS log on.

I might be doing something wrong. After you spend hours getting vista to work, one's mind is a bit frayed.

 

[robertpri]

To configure bootmgr in Vista is command bcdedit (command bcdedit /? display all options of these command) but simply and better way is to use EasyBCD ->Download EasyBCD 1.7.2 - NeoSmart Technologies

Many many thanks! Others have mentioned BCD and I also thank them!

It was so simple that I worried about it. I've tried other methods including Acronis and Partition Manager, but they either failed or did not work well.

Easy BCD was a couple of clicks, it found the two bootable drives, and now lists them on every boot. Both the laptop and backup drive boot and work perfectly!

Many thanks!