Is there a way of having two hard drives on the same computer and have a duel boot system . ie two drives each with xp o/s and to be able to switch between them without turning the computer off.

Dual boot normally means that you turn it off and on. You can run virtual machines such as QEMU,Bochs, VirtualPC, or VMware's products if you want to keep the system powered up and in an operation state. Now if you have a very new system there are ways to actually run two os's. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you goober.

I don't know why you'd want to dual boot XP with XP, but there are ways of doing what you're asking. However, if the 2nd HDD was taken from a different PC, you're bound to have problems because that installation of XP is configured for the other PC. You could go into the BIOS & change the boot order from HDD to HDD depending on which one you wanna boot from, or you could try a 3rd party boot manager.

I think ancients question was could you run two OS's at the same time from two hard drives. answer is no. from one hard drive yes. Vmware or virtual pc will accomplish the dual system without reboot between the two. Knowing the correct answer and giving a correct answer, are two different things

I can see why you would want two xp's installed on two diff hard drives on the same pc. It's a good idea If you and someone else uses the same computer and both of you want to have your own OS to use differently. Or if you want to beta test stuff on one OS so it doesn't mess up your primary OS. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz 2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7900GT SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0+1 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

I have XP on my main 360gig drive and because I was having some trouble with it my local technician installed a second 160gig drive. his instruction was to duplicate the contents so that we coul d isolate the problem. I could boot to either drive by altering the boot order in the BIOS but this was time consuming so I edited the boot.ini to dual boot. At startup I have the option of booting into either system by using the up/down arrows in the menu. The answer to the question is yes you can have XP on different drives in the same box and boot to either one of them. REgards Once I thought I was wrong, now I'm not so sure!

Ewen Poster says "able to switch between them without turning the computer off". I think therefore the answer to the question is NO, unless you invoke suggestions such as those already given in #1 & #3. Subject line of question was a tad misleading tho (quite apart from the Freudian slip - which implies them fighting to the death LOL). DerekW