Question about dual boot system

[isma]

I currently own a rig with an ATI video card and wanted to build a second rig with a nVidia card, but I guess that a dual boot system would be far cheaper than building a second rig.

So, would it be better and/or simpler to have a dual boot system with one hard drive with two partitions ?

Or to have a dual boot system with two hard drives ? Using the existing one that I have, wich is a Raptor.

Having one operating system with ATI driver and the other with nVidia driver, I would just have to change video cards between boots.

For now I only have Windows XP and I'm considering Vista later this winter.

Thanks for your advices.

 

[SmokeRngs]

No offense intended, but why would you want to do this just because of two different video cards?

You'll find out very quickly that having to swap vid cards and dual booting would be beyond annoying. I dual boot with XP and SUSE but I don't have to do anything but reboot and select the OS I want. Swapping hardware would be beyond annoying. It was bad enough when I was dual booting from two different physical drives and I had to change the drive boot order in the BIOS so everything would actually work correctly. Luckily, that was just for testing purposes which was remedied by putting both OSes on different partitions on the same drive.

I would seriously look into running two different systems if you're dead set on using both video cards. I run three systems at my desk currently and will never go with less than two physical systems at my fingertips for various reasons.

 

[isma]

No offense intended, but why would you want to do this just because of two different video cards?

You'll find out very quickly that having to swap vid cards and dual booting would be beyond annoying. I dual boot with XP and SUSE but I don't have to do anything but reboot and select the OS I want. Swapping hardware would be beyond annoying. It was bad enough when I was dual booting from two different physical drives and I had to change the drive boot order in the BIOS so everything would actually work correctly. Luckily, that was just for testing purposes which was remedied by putting both OSes on different partitions on the same drive.

I would seriously look into running two different systems if you're dead set on using both video cards. I run three systems at my desk currently and will never go with less than two physical systems at my fingertips for various reasons.

I know that swapping hardware is annoying but it is cheaper than building a second rig.

So from what I understand it would be simpler to have just one hard drive with two partitions ?

Won't there be any drivers conflicts ?

 

[l3ender]

You could do either two drives or two partitions. Personally, I would find using two partitions easier.

As far as driver conflicts, the appropriate OS's and the drivers for their respective video cards will be on different OS's on different partitions. Shouldn't have any problems with conflicts.

I also agree with Smoke, this would be highly annoying to me at least. To each their own.

 

[isma]

You could do either two drives or two partitions. Personally, I would find using two partitions easier.

As far as driver conflicts, the appropriate OS's and the drivers for their respective video cards will be on different OS's on different partitions. Shouldn't have any problems with conflicts.

I also agree with Smoke, this would be highly annoying to me at least. To each their own.

Well I think now that I will go for a 500Gb drive with two partitions.

I'm doing this for different reasons and I would never consider having two video cards but I have no choice.

Thanks for your advice.

 

[isma]

When your scanning for viruses, do you have to choose wich partition to scan or the anti-virus scan the complete drive ?

 

[SmokeRngs]

It is definitely easier to go with different partitions on a single physical drive. Personally, I would go with three partitions. One for one OS, a second for the other OS and a third for storage. That's the way I usually do it. I make the OS partitions big enough to fix the OS and then some extra space. I usually use 10 gig for XP partitions and Linux partitions. Then I use the storage partition for whatever.

In your case, I'm assuming you'll just be using two XP installations so the storage partition shouldn't cause any trouble. I install most of my apps and games on the storage partition so I can use one installation of each program on both OSes to save space. You would do this only for programs like office, zip programs and things like that which don't really care what the hardware it is you're running on. It should work just fine for games also. I've kept my games installed on a separate partition so I don't lose things between OS installations and I've never had a problem, even when switching graphics cards as part of the reinstallation of the OS. The most I would have to do is change some graphical settings in the game depending on what the older and newer vid card could handle.

As previously stated, there won't be any type of driver conflicts since each OS will be compartmentalized within it's own partition. You'll just have to make sure you boot into the correct OS with the correct hardware.

As for the virus scan, it will probably depend on what virus scanner you use. You may have to create a specific scanning profile to scan all drive letters but that should be the only thing you would need to do.

 

[isma]

It is definitely easier to go with different partitions on a single physical drive. Personally, I would go with three partitions. One for one OS, a second for the other OS and a third for storage. That's the way I usually do it. I make the OS partitions big enough to fix the OS and then some extra space. I usually use 10 gig for XP partitions and Linux partitions. Then I use the storage partition for whatever.

In your case, I'm assuming you'll just be using two XP installations so the storage partition shouldn't cause any trouble. I install most of my apps and games on the storage partition so I can use one installation of each program on both OSes to save space. You would do this only for programs like office, zip programs and things like that which don't really care what the hardware it is you're running on. It should work just fine for games also. I've kept my games installed on a separate partition so I don't lose things between OS installations and I've never had a problem, even when switching graphics cards as part of the reinstallation of the OS. The most I would have to do is change some graphical settings in the game depending on what the older and newer vid card could handle.

As previously stated, there won't be any type of driver conflicts since each OS will be compartmentalized within it's own partition. You'll just have to make sure you boot into the correct OS with the correct hardware.

As for the virus scan, it will probably depend on what virus scanner you use. You may have to create a specific scanning profile to scan all drive letters but that should be the only thing you would need to do.

Thank you these are great advices.