Having two OS bootable hard drives possible?

[deeselcyde]

I have a P67 Extreme4 with a 2500k and a 64 gig SSD. I am running 64 bit PRO on my SSD (AHCI) with a couple of internal hard drives. I have an extra hard drive lying around and I was planning on putting on an old copy of Vista on it solely to run my work program...

I disconnected all hard drives except for the future Vista drive. Installed Vista (IDE mode).

I was hoping to (when needed) boot to my Vista drive when work-time was needed and then booting normally to my SSD when normal-time was needed.

After the install I could not boot to my SSD. I would either get a cold restart or an error saying it could not boot to the operating system. It was impossible for it to be corrupted because it wasn't connected when I was installing the Vista hard drive.

Do I have to have two AHCI hard drives connected in order to perform the task that I want?

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[deeselcyde]

Re: Having two OS bootable hard drives possible?

I was reading online and saw something about installing an AHCI driver during the install...The VISTA hard drive is a SATA drive BTW.

[wazza300]

Re: Having two OS bootable hard drives possible?

You need ahci drivers on a Usb or floppy drive before you install Vista,your ssd and vista drive will run fine in IDE mode,but for ahci/vista pre install drivers are needed,same for xp,only win7 installs drivers for you aslong as you set ahci before installing it

[deeselcyde]

Re: Having two OS bootable hard drives possible?

Okay, that makes sense.

But, is that the reason why it corrupted my SSD? Say you install a SSD under AHCI, will it corrupt it when trying to run it in IDE mode? Essentially, that's what I did...But it doesn't make any sense



So when installing Windows Vista in AHCI mode, should I put the bios in AHCI mode and then install the AHCI drivers, or, put it in IDE mode and install the AHCI drivers?

[deeselcyde]

Re: Having two OS bootable hard drives possible?

I was also thinking after looking through my bios again....

I have two Marvell Sata3 controllers that I am not currently using. There are two options for those: 1. Mode Type: IDE and AHCI and 2. Bootable? yes or no

So could I install my Vista drive on one of those and just install it IDE?


I just switched my SSD to IDE and booted into windows. It installed IDE drivers for my 3 drives connected which made me a bit nervous, but booted back up in AHCI mode without a hitch.

I'm thinking it got corrupted by having two hard drives with two different types of boot files..?

What'dyah think?

[wazza300]

Re: Having two OS bootable hard drives possible?

Could be,I would turn of the Marvell ports if unused,stick to one SATA controller for exmple intel,as bot to complicate things

Switching back and running in IDE from ahci is fine once ahci drivers are installed,but you can't run in ahci without first selecting ahci mode in the BIOS and installing drivers when the OS prompts you(drivers not needed for win7)

[bahram_alinezhad]

Re: Having two OS bootable hard drives possible?

Hello
First make clear that your failure in boot is by BIOS or by OS.
If you see a message like "Not a system disk" or "There is no OS on disk", it is a bios message. In this case you have to check if:
1-Is your desired boot drive detected in bios or not;
2-Is that drive selected as first boot device or not.
Note that Compatible (IDE) or Enhanced mode for drive has no rule here.

If you see a message like "hal.dll was not found or corrupted" or if get blue screen on boot time, it is an os message. So change the ATA mode in your bios to get it working or re-install its os with special drivers supplied.