Opinions on hard drive power selector switch?

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rygy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 19, 2003
Messages
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When I built my last hackintosh it was a hassle getting a dual boot configured with OSX and Windows 7. I didn't need each OS to see the other partition or drive, essentially I wanted two independent systems running on the same hardware.
Now I'm considering taking another crack at it with an Ivy Bridge set up but I was curious what people thought of using a hardware selector switch for the hard drive power connections. I'd have to power down the system before selecting each drive but it seems like it would work really well.

 
I have no problem dual-booting my hackintosh without resorting to physical power switches. Add Macdrive to Windows and Paragon NTFS to OSX and you will have R/W access from either OS to the others filesystem. For more info on the best choices hardware-wise for a Hackintosh you can start here.
 
One problem I see is you still have to have a sata port for each hard drive.
If you use a swappable bay, you can use one sata port, and just pop whatever OS drive you want to use that time.
Or you could have two swappable bays. Leave them both plugged in when you want the first OS, pull the first drive out partially when you want the second OS.
Swappable bays are more expensive though.

HDD selectors seem cheap enough though that it doesn't hurt to try it out.
 
Ya, a swappable bay would work better but I have a mini-ITX case so both drives will have to be installed. There's no problem with both of them using a SATA slot either.

And, "resorting to physical switches" is a more elegant solution to me than having to configure the boot options between OSX and Windows and accounting for the clock reset problems when switching back and forth.
 
rygy said:
Ya, a swappable bay would work better but I have a mini-ITX case so both drives will have to be installed. There's no problem with both of them using a SATA slot either.

And, "resorting to physical switches" is a more elegant solution to me than having to configure the boot options between OSX and Windows and accounting for the clock reset problems when switching back and forth.
Click to expand...

Not sure how this would be a solution to the clock reset issue. Both OSs will fight over wether the HW clock should be GMT or Local that is independent of the hard drives. Most OSes except windows treat the HW clock as being GMT, for whatever reason Windows feels it should be set to local time. It looks like that registry fix changes how windows treats the HW clock.
 
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