[midgo]

I have vista ultimate installed on a spare drive that I use just for testing.

At the moment I have to disconnect the cable and power supply from this drive and re-connect my xp drive to use one or the other

Can I put this drive into the pc and then connect both drives together on the same cable and use either to boot from.

I think I would need a new boot.ini file but how to write one manually without re installing or changing any software.

And if it can be done which boot.ini to change the one on the xp drive or the one on the vista drive or both?

Any help appreciated.

[midgo]

Just to let you guys know I have achieved what I wanted to do by using a little free boot manager program available here.

http://gag.sourceforge.net/

After it is installed it works completely independent of any operating system. It becomes the first boot device and then you go where you want from it.

It will also fit on a floppy and in that case you just boot the floppy.

Try that first and if you like it put it on the Master drive. Or just always boot the floppy.

I made my xp drive the primary and the vista drive the slave.

As soon as I did this and booted with the floppy I made of the program it showed both operating systems and I can boot with either using the floppy.

If I take the floppy out then the secondary booting device is the xp drive which starts.

I think I will use this method as I don't want to save any configurations to a hard drive that may be hard to remove.

It has made using my computer a lot easier as I take vista for a test drive before deciding if I want to use it permanently.
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[sunnyeagle]

Thanks for the info. I will use this when I choose to do what you did.