Hi, i went to the microsoft website and googled and i'm still a little confused about how to do this. i have a HD with xp home and one with xp pro. i want to use the one with xp pro for my music production. and keep the hd with hp home for web surfing and download and stuff. now. what's the easiest way of doing this? without formatting anything. i've read something online, like for a dual boot system. but from what i gathered, it was on putting 2 different OS in one HD, like a partition or something. and that's not what i'm trying to do.
thanks in advance

so you want to mount a hard-drive to save your data, like a pen-drive?

http://www.pcmech.com/article/instal...-step-by-step/

Just plug them both in and alter the boot sequence in bios as required.

Simple.

yeah...but he's go to change the pin to be at "slave" . It's confusing 1st time doing it.

not when were here to help

yea, i looked at the wires that i have in this system. the don't know what they are called. but the gray long wire that's going into my main HD is labeled master. and there's a free one labeled slave. i'm not doing this so i save date. i just want to use one HD for surfing. and the other HD for music production. and then later on down the line upgrade them each to a 250+gb hard drive. but that's a whole other topic. i'm going to look into my BIOS set up and do this right now. will let you know how it turned out.

ok, so i tried doing it. at first my master hd became my slave in my bios. so i went back. tried to move some wires around to change things. i tried to take out the pin thing which makes the hd a master or slave. while i was taking it out i lost the little sucker. so i had an old hd from an old system. i took the jumper setting thing from there and from them on it didn't work. it didn't recognize in bios. i think i messed up that HD somehow. does each drive need it's own jumper cables? and something weird that i found on the drive, it says jumper: j50, master/single: On, Slaveff. and it's a maxtor drive, does this mean anything?

Ugh, alright. This should work. Since you already have windows installed on the slave drive you may have issues depending on how different this computer is to the old one you ripped the hdd from.

If you've already played around with the master drive. Set it back up as it was and leave it.

Leave your original hdd alone. This will be set as master already and will need to stay as master. On the second hdd you will have all those pins that you were talking about. There's the little plastic jumper as well. ie this stuff:


Now don't copy that info as your hdd will probably be different. On it somewhere should be a sticker (might be something else) with similar information on it. Find the config for slave and set the jumper accordingly. ie: on the picture, you just remove the jumper ( I believe this is common). Now you can plug the slave ide (next plug down the line that your current hdd is plugged into) into the back of this hdd.

Now boot into bios and make sure both hdd's are recognised. If you boot allow the computer to boot it should still boot into the windows you have installed on your master.

You now have the option of installing a bootloader such as 'lilo' or if you have an xp disc you can try the fix mbr command

Done!

*sorry for using hdd so much

what do you mean by this? i'm a little confused. from what i got from it is. plug the ide wires from the master into the slave?

On the cable that is plugged into the master drive is a second plug near the middle of it. This should say slave on it