My boot order is - CD, Floppy and hdd1. My bios does NOT have option to boot from hdd2 (don't know why). Please give an idea how to boot from both hard disks. Boths hdds have xp installed. i want to use boths os independently.
If any one have any information about bios not supporting another hard disk, please convey.

More information would be helpful.

Did you install both instances of XP on this system, or did you just pop in another hard drive with XP already installed?

Are both hard drives IDE drives or a combination of IDS and SATA?

How are both jumpered, if they are both IDE drives?

In terms of the bios, what motherboard make and model is in the system? Or, is this a Dell, Gateway or other major brand system? If the latter, what make and model?

Both are XP system, loaded separately. Both are IDE drives. Both are connected in master mode. One is primary master another is secondary master. Bios is showing ides properly.
But, the problem is in Boot configuration I can put only one hard disk. It is not taking two harddisks. So, now to change hdd, i must go to bios every time.
The motherboard is from INtel, 845GVSR chipset .

Did you load XP on each drive while they were both on the system, or with only one drive in the system at a time (each instance of XP was installed with only that hard drive in the system as primary master)?

I Have installed Xp individually. With connecting only one hdd each time.

Ideally, you need to install both instances of XP with both drives in the system. Otherwise it get's complicated.

See this article for examples of loading multiple installations of Windows.

So what you have now is that both drives are recognized in the bios when they are connected.

The origional installation is on primary master.

The other is on secondary master, installed originally as primary master. It is likely that this will not work, but you know how to edit the boot.ini file?

Your original install boot.ini on the primary master should look something like;

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect


You can try to add the second install to that boot.ini (in bold)

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(0)WINDOWS="Windows XP2" /fastdetect

There is another technique on how to do this, let me look it up again.


...OK see this article.