Two hard disks - selection at boot?

[TheKentishFledgling]

I have two HDs in my PC, one running windows and one running linux - for various reasons I DON'T want to partition, hence the two drives.

At the moment I simply switch the IDE cable to whichever I want to use, windows or linux.

Is it possible to connect both HDs as master drives, and at boot select which one? I guess if this is possible, it's a BIOS thing?

Don't want to try any connections until I know it's not going to blow one of the drives up!

Thanks,
Ed Ludlow

 

[wolluf]

You can do the 'switch' in the bios rather than switching cables (eg, change the boot order so second hard drive is first boot device, then back so first hard drive is).

Or you could use a boot manager (linux usually comes with lilo or grub) - I use

http://www.boot-us.com

- which if you use the menu on floppy gives full functionality free and doesn't update your hard drives.