Hooking up an OS drive as a data drive

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Kyohe

Weaksauce
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Aug 28, 2004
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I have Win 7 installed on my current computer, but I also have my old Win XP install for the same computer on another HDD. I would like to hook up the Win XP drive as a secondary drive, to access the other data that's on it. My concern is that the two OSs will conflict with each other and possibly cause corruption. I would like it to just function as a data drive, but with the possibility of using the XP install again in the future. Is there any way I can temporarily "disable" the XP install? I hope that made sense. Thanks for any help.
 
As long as your bios is configured that the 7 drive is the primary boot drive, you will have zero issues.

In the bios, you should have an option 'Hard Drive Boot Order' or something like that. The drive will be listed by model number.
 
Boot the computer into Windows 7 since that's already functional, and plug in the XP drive.

What's so tough about that? :D

As noted, unless your machine has some BIOS priority set to boot from external devices (USB, eSATA, whatever) it's going to default to the drive it already uses: the Windows 7 one.

Some BIOS defaults will have a USB/external drive given priority (higher on the list) so, it's worth checking into. If necessary all you have to do is reorder the priority so it's something like CD/DVD 1st, physical hard drive 2nd, then USB/externals 3rd, etc giving the internal hard drive the chance to boot before the USB/externals.
 
Ah, well... same advice I suppose just making sure the BIOS priority is assigned to the right drive as already mentioned (by bigdogchris).
 
Great, I thought it might be that simple, but I didn't want to experiment with all my data on the line. I'll give it a try. Thanks.
 
I hooked it up and booted into Win 7 no problem. I can see most of the folders just fine, but when I go to open some of them it says I don't have permission to open them. Is this some security feature of Win 7? Does anyone know exactly what it does when I "Take ownership" of a folder? Can I disable this? It's a bit tedious doing it for every folder I want to open.
 
It's a permissions thing related to their being another OS on the drive with NTFS permissions on the files. I believe it's possible to alter the permissions on the entire drive itself by right-clicking on the drive in Explorer, going to the Security tab, Advanced, and then altering the Owner on the entire contents. This may have some repercussions later on if you intend to use that drive booting XP in the future, however.

Someone else might be able to offer more info, as well, and probably will.
 
It should give you a UAC style pop up that asks you if you want to gain access to the files. You may need to provide an administrative password. If you say yes, it will add your account to the permissions on the file without wiping out the old ones from XP. That's what I've been doing with my old XP drive and both OSes seem to be sharing the files so far.
 
Windows 7 is overly security conscience. Just do a full re-permission of the drive. Right click on the drive in Explorer or My Computer and click the security tab. Add Administrator and what ever user you log in with and grant them full control. Ensure that you say on all sub files and folders when it asks. Let it run. If you have lots of files and folders it will take some time.
 
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