Dual Booting with two hard drives

[oasisgjm]

If I took two hard drives with operating systems and installed them on the same IDE cable as masters. Then installed a switch that alternated power between each drive so that in position A only drive 1 had power, in position B, only drive 2 had power. Would this give me a dual bootable system? I have seen other switching devices that changed the jumpers externally, but this still means the second drive is spinning and accessible. I like the idea of having the unused drive powered down and out of the loop. Make sense?

 

[rclarke250]

Safer to go with a removable drive tray. Then you just lock in the drive you want to use and boot the pc.

Rich

 

[oasisgjm]

Actually I used to have two removable trays and just powered one or the other off depending on which disk I wanted to boot from. The trays weren't that well built and eventually, the latches broke.

 

[hughk]

I have done this and it works perfect for the switch I used a regular switch on the 12v wire