Creating a Dual Boot with two hard drives without touching MBR/boot.ini

[+Plague+]

My intention is to setup a dual boot system for a person who knows very little about computers. The problem with conventional methods such as grub is that from my understanding, one of the hard drives must be modified in order for it to work.

This is a problem for me because if he hard drive with grub or a similar program fails, the second hard drive will not be able to boot properly.

Ideally, I would like something that can be run off of a flash or floppy drive, which gives the option of which hard drive to boot up. Again, I don't want anything to be changed with either hard drive. If grub can be run off of a floppy or flash and control two sata hard drives I think that will work for me.

 

[yossarian]

I've run XP and Win 7 for a time on two drives independent of one another. I selected which OS/drive to run from the motherboard bios. If I recall I used f12 on boot which brings up a list of installed drives, but you need to know the drive you want (Seagate, Samsung, etc.). By default it went into Win 7. Install each with the other drive disconnected so they don't interfere with each other. See if your MB supports it.

 

[serpretetsky]

I'm not sure, but I think the feature you're loooking for in grub is called chain loading

"In operating system boot manager programs, chain loading is used to pass control from the boot manager to a boot sector. The target boot sector is loaded in from disk, replacing the in-memory boot sector from which the boot manager itself was bootstrapped, and executed." -wikipedia

yossarian's solution is overall simpler, if you don't mind pressing f12 or the esc key during boot (depends on motherboard).

 

[+Plague+]

I was hoping to avoid doing that as I think this customer wants something that will prompt him everytime he starts, but I will run it by him and let him know if bringing up the boot order is a good alternative

 

[x509]

I don't want to hijack this thread.

I'm about to start a new thread about multi-booting several installs of Win 7. Comments and responses much appreciated.