i want to put in a second hard drive and be able to switch on start up from one to the other is there a way to do this. thanks

Why don't you consider installing a removeable drive rack in your computer? Then, with each drive in a separate caddy, you can switch between them whenever you want. They now have 'hot-swappable' caddies that do not require shutting down your computer when it comes time to make the switchover. Cool or what?

Yes, I dual boot on my PC with Linux on one drive and Win98 on the other. Install your drives and take a note of the assigned drive letters (probably C and D). Then in your BIOS, when you want to switch which drive it boots from, there should be a setting which selects which order it checks the drives. Depending on your BIOS, it may be called a number of things, but you should be able to find it. If you change anything, remember what the original value was and if it doesn't work, then you can always change it back.

There is a way to do this. it is a little bit harder if you have a newer computer system that you do not want to take apart then I would not recommend doing this but it does work. on the bottom or side of a hard drive has manual switches called jumpers. these switches rotate between Master hard drives and slave hard drives. if you want to use a operating system on one hard drive and not the other you can set the hard drive you want to use to master and the other hard drive to slave. you can do this dy taking off the jumper and placing it over the correct two wires. Although works for windows 95 and 98 progamed hard drives i woud not recommend to do this if you had Windows NT, 2000, And sometimes ME(millenninum edition) because these except for 95 and 98 have diffrent startup directories and will show you in DOS if there is a diffrent type of startup file on one drive than the other and will tell you you have to change the format of the drive. Good Luck.