Ignore - moved to Computer forum. Thanks.

I purchased Win 7 and a new hard drive, extra ram and installed some days ago on my HP Vista dual core machine. After a few issues X1 seems to be working fine (I posted a couple questions in that forum).
The hard drive didn't come with any cable so I used the sata drive to motherboard cable from the existing hard drive.
I want to dual boot, for a while at least and I've been trying to find another sata drive to motherbord cable. Bestbuy say they have one at 20 bucks but that seems alot.
Sata to sata cables abound, and are cheap, so my question is:
If I use a sata to sata (with one of the drives going to the motherboard) can I dual boot by interrupting the bootup?
I get the option by pressing esc.
Initially I expected to have to get a drive/motherboard cable, but now I'm not so sure.
Any advice appreciated.

DaveElson


I purchased Win 7 and a new hard drive, extra ram and installed some days ago on my HP Vista dual core machine. After a few issues X1 seems to be working fine (I posted a couple questions in that forum).
The hard drive didn't come with any cable so I used the sata drive to motherboard cable from the existing hard drive.
I want to dual boot, for a while at least and I've been trying to find another sata drive to motherbord cable. Bestbuy say they have one at 20 bucks but that seems alot.
Sata to sata cables abound, and are cheap, so my question is:
If I use a sata to sata (with one of the drives going to the motherboard) can I dual boot by interrupting the bootup?
I get the option by pressing esc.
Initially I expected to have to get a drive/motherboard cable, but now I'm not so sure.
Any advice appreciated.

Are you meaning chaining the drives one to another in some way?  If so don't even think about it.

Each drive needs its own seperate channel from the motherboard.  Most newer MB's use Sata to Sata connectors.

Once you have both drives working properly independently (i.e you can see the other drive once you've booted up) make it easy on yourself and use something like EasyBCD to set up the dual boot.

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

I have an W7 64 / XP 32 bit dual boot split on 2 partitions on a single drive with 2  further drives (projects and samples) to share data with either OS.

DaveElson


Jonbouy
I was thinking of chaining, but only if that would work.
My motherboard is a few years old and it doesn't look like it has the same connector.
Craig.
Thanks for that - never though of looking there.

I don't even know if you can run a SATA drive on the old IDE style connector, so I'd suggest if you really need to boot up both OS's then do it on a partitioned single drive as you won't be using both OS's simultaneously.

This thread is prefect for me.

Any thing with "ignore" in the title means I can post my drivel and no one will notice.



Drivel.

I was a prefect at skool too, everyone ignored me then too.