Having it both ways?

[youngtomedison]

My current machine is a 1 Ghz PIII with 512MB of RAM. I've run it as a dual-boot machine by way of what some here might consider to be a heavy-handed technique.

My machine has one of those removable-hard-drive bays which you can get at places like geeks,com or any decent computer store. It takes those plastic caddies. I have two hard drives, each in their own caddy, one with Windoze, the other with Debian Etch. When I want to switch from Linux to Windows, I just unlock the bay (with the machine OFF of course!), pull out the Linux caddy and insert the Windows caddy. I lock the bay, start the machine, and go! My machine also has a DVD-ROM drive, for playing DVDs and a DVD burner, strictly for burning discs (this saves wear and tear on the burner).

Recently I came into a replacement for my PIII, a Dell Optiplex 260. Trouble is, it only has two 5.5-inch bays on it. meaning that if I put my two DVD drives into it, there's no room for the removable-drive port.

I've thought of using a dual-boot configuration, but that would mean I'd have to install Windows first (NO!! I WON'T!! YOU CAN'T MAKE ME!!!), and I've had less-than optimal experiences with dual-boot same-drive systems. I was thinking of mounting my two hard drives in the machine, installing Debian on one, then installing Windows on the other (with the Linux drive temporarily disconnected so as to avoid mishaps). Since I use Windows pretty seldom, I thought that changing the BIOS setting to boot from one drive or the other would do pretty much the same thing as my old method with the plastic caddies.

Has anyone tried this approach and if so, how well did it work?

[mrrangerman43]

Well it gets to be a pain in the butt after few days, I have a tri-boot system with windows xp on a raid0 setup and then two scsi drives one with Debian, the other with Gentoo. Take a look at this (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=144476) and you will get an idea what I had to do. If your bios will let you pick hd for boot order you will have to let the drive with linux on it be the first to boot, and map the windows drive in your Grub menu.lst and then when you boot you will end up with a menu to pick what OS you want to boot to.

[saikee]

I use nothing but mobile racks myself but for a different reason.

On booting I am more happy to provide advice.

If one try to understand booting, which is possibly one of the easiest part in Linux , especially Grub then multi-booting is just a child play.

There is no need to change the Bios too. Just tell Grub what you want.

I packed 145 systems (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=147959) in a box and boot everyone with identically the same 3 lines of Grub commands changing only the partition reference. There are 3 Dos and 5 Windows inside plus a few Linux. So you can have it at least 100+ ways.
There is no necessity to reinstall Windows or any of the Linux. Linux can be migrated easily. For Windows mrrangerman43 has already showed the disk order can be "re-mapped" on-the-fly. Both Grub and Lilo can do this sort of things.