Adding a second Win H/D

Can I add a new Vista/Win7 upgrade H/D to an existing XP /13.1 machine keeping all three boot options? The XP will no longer be used except occasionally booted to retrieve older stuff that I don’t feel like or have time to move over. This is a legitimate  Vista/Win7 upgrade from the wife's crashed machine and she would like to get some more use out of it as it had a very short life. She uses a laptop but prefers a desktop so I've slapped together the XP/13.1 desktop some time ago and just now getting around to the upgrade.

I would like to keep both drives for now until she no longer needs anything form the XP.

It's possible. I have a laptop that has factory installed Vista, never been re-installed. I installed OpenSuse 11.3 within in a few days of taking possession, with no problems. Upgraded to 12.1, no problems. Upgraded to 13.1. It works most of the time, but occasionally (and I don't know why), Vista changes things and when I go to boot I get a "multiple active boot partitions" message and I have to get a bootable CD with fdisk on it and deactivate one of the partitions. Not a big deal, just keep the CD/DVD/floppy close. There's a way to fix that, but I can't remember the details. Don't know why mine only acts up some of the time. It's only after I've booted into vista, but not every time, and only since the 13.1 upgrade.

Go for it and good luck!

I haven’t had any problems with XP and openSUSE together (with installing XP first) so I was wondering if this new drive will fight with the old one on boot.  Would installing 13.1 on the new Win7/ Vista drive be a better idea?  

The board I am using is an Intel board that supports Vista but I could not get it to install and had to use my computer to do that. I'm hoping Win7 upgrade will work on it, when I finally do get around to physically plugging it in.

I have heard of people booting 3+ from machines, including multiple Windows ie XP, 7, server 2003. Don't remember trying it myself, but should be enough tutorials online to make it simple. I have done it with multiple linux partitions before, but nowadays I'd probably just virtualize them to play with. As a matter of fact I'm considering just virtualizing my linux anyway on top of win 7.

My son at one time claimed he had 18 OSes on one machine, and could boot to any of them from grub. I can't remember them all, but I think it would have been multiple versions of windows (back then I think 98 would have been the newest), possibly two DOSes (would have been ms and DR), multiple Linux distros, a couple of BSDs, maybe OS/2 and, if it was around then, BeOS. (I know he liked BeOS, just can't remember the timeline.) Back then he liked to do things just to see if he could.

findoctr wrote:

Can I add a new Vista/Win7 upgrade H/D to an existing XP /13.1 machine keeping all three boot options? .

Shouldn't be a problem, and if you are willing to shell out $25, there is
OSL2000 Boot Manager that can install up to 100 systems using 1 click.

Personally I prefer to keep all my data from older systems on a USB stick rather than go the multi-boot route.

Laz wrote:

Personally I prefer to keep all my data from older systems on a USB stick rather than go the multi-boot route

I normally use a fresh H/D when upgrading SUSE retaining the older version as a boot option using it as a reference saving me the effort of moving it all until I wipe it upon the next new installation recycling the drives as I go. (these are 2 of a pile of 80 gig drives I accumulated from the Me/XP era.

This other computer use to be the family machine but now it is used basically by my wife and there is more than 500 gigs of everyone’s stuff on it and I just do not have time to deal with it so when someone comes over and wants this or that from way back when, they can just boot it and take their time to copy it.  

I have another pile of drives of all different sizes from Win95 to XP that my son keeps using to retrieve pics., docs. and old graphic images that he made, but he mounts those in his own computer or uses a usb drive adapter.