Can a hard drive with an OS on it be a slave?

Factual Questions
1

When I got home a week ago, my desktop (pc) computer was off, which was a little strange since it had been in the process of burning a cd when I left. Turning it back on revealed a weirdly pixilated screen, and it only stayed on for a few seconds. Now it doesn’t power up at all. I’m hoping that the problem is only the power supply keeling over, but if it’s not, and it took out the motherboard too…well, the computer is almost four years old and replacing a motherboard isn’t something I’m confident I can acomplish (even a power supply will be a learning experience), so I guess I won’t be able to wait until I get my tax refund to replace it like I intended to.

Planning for that possiblity: can I take the hard drive from that computer and install it as a secondary drive in another computer? My ailing computer has Windows Vista on it, and the other computer would likely have Windows 7. I don’t want to boot Vista on the new computer, for the record, I just want to know if it would cause problems to have a secondary drive with an OS on it. I’m hoping that the computer would simply ignore the fact that another OS is installed on the other drive.

And if it’s not likely to cause issues, how would I remove Vista from the drive? Would that be possible without wiping the disk completely? And as a bonus question, that drive has a rescue “drive” partitioned into it for an emergency back up, which would be of no use on another computer, so can that drive be unpartitioned to finally make use of that space?

2

Sure, I’ve done it many many times before usb and home DSL internet. I’d download large files at work from Usenet on my T1 connection. Bring the hard drive from my pc at home, set it on a book, and plug it in. I never put the case cover on my pc at the house. The biggest risk was shorting out the drive. That’s why I set it on a book as an insulator.

Right now, my old laptop drive is in a usb case. I use it as a spare for holding music and video files. It still has Win XP on it.

Modern SATA drives don’t have master/slave anyhow. Only older IDE has master/slave jumpers.

3

Speaking as a computing professional with 12 years in the trade, the answer to your first question is yes.
My lunch just arrived, so I’ll let someone answer the rest of your post.

4

That brings up a good point with SATA. If you plug in a second drive with an OS, the bios controls which one tries to start windows.

Normally, I always plug my primary drive in sata 0. then the second drive in sata 1. The bios will try to boot sata 0 first, unless you change the setting manually.

Dual booting, (where you deliberately install two OS) is different. That’s handled by the boot loader on the hard drive.

5

Normally with XP I’d suggest deleting the Windows and Program Files folders. Vista, has file security. I’m not sure it would let you delete easily. Won’t hurt to try. :wink: Just remember it’s permanent. bye bye windows.

You can go into properties and set view all files. Then look at C:\ and delete io.sys, boot.ini, and msdos.sys. I think windows still uses those hidden files. Del pagefile.sys to free up space.

6

Vista has a file, winload.exe that controls booting. Delete that to kill Vista.

Vista’s boot load sequence…

7

As other have noted, the answer is yes - this is standard practice when a PC dies but the hard drive is still working properly (a common situation).

8

Not only can you have an OS on a slave, you can boot some of them from it. I have a machine running 6 OSes in a multiboot config, and 3 of them boot off a slave drive.

On your other questions, I think some of these other posters are missing your point. Vista won’t even try and start from the old drive. Win 7 won’t care about it’s old security settings. All you have to do is leave vista on the old drive. Just copy the user files you want to keep from the old drive to the new machine’s drive, then repartition and format the old drive.

If you don’t know how to repartition and format, come back after you’ve gotten the new machine and copied the files to the new HD. I’m sure, even if I don’t see it, that someone can tell you how.

9

Earlier, I was giving the quick way to remove windows. Takes less than a minute to delete a couple system folders and free up space.

Moving several hundred gig of personal files, music, videos etc. is a lot of work. It’s easy to overlook something like your email file (outlook.pst) or IE bookmarks. Take your time. Use search to find any jpg, avi, or docs in folders that you overlooked.

I agree moving everything and zero clearing the drive is the best solution. The hard disk manufacturers have a free utility you can download to test and zero clear (wipe) the drive. That gets rid of any system partitions. Then you can repartition and format in windows.

10

{Bolding mine) Are there OSes that will not boot from a slave drive, as long as you use the BIOS or a smart boot loader?

11

I’m using a boot loader called XOSL (google that and it’s page comes out near or at the top). It has a few settings that can be used to “fool” the OS into thinking various low level disk parameters that depend on “master/slave” or “first/second IDE bus” are different. The reason I said “some of them” is because I have never tried all of them.

Some OSes can’t see any partition that comes before their boot partition, because they expect theirs to be first, so you have to hide earlier ones from it. I designed my system so that certain OSes had priority over others. For example, you don’t want any Winblows version to have access to FreeDOS’s partition, because Microshit thinks they rule the world, and so they frequently assume that theirs is the only OS you have. The result is that Winblows then goes and fucks up something on the FreeDOS boot partition that was put there intentionally, because it thinks it’s a disk error.

As a result, all the operating systems have to come in a certain order, on certain disks. Mine, as an example, has:
1st disk (master), Partition 1) FreeDOS 2) Linux boot 3) Winblows 98 4) Winblows 2000.
2nd disk (slave), Partition 1) MSDOS 6.22 2) OS/2 v4 3) a shared FAT16 partition for DOS & OS/2 4) the main Winblows D: drive partition
3rd disk (master), Partition 1-3) reserved for some experimental OSes that I haven’t yet got around to installing 4) Linux root

Because of this, I only tried to put OSes on the slave that I didn’t want to access earlier partitions. Think of the master disk partitions and slave partitions as being equivalent to 8 primary partitions on a single disk, for priority purposes. So, the only ones I know, because I’ve done it, that will work on a slave are MSDOS (probably any version after 4), OS/2 v3 & 4, Winblows 98, & Winblows 2k. Linux depends on the Disro and version, because it depends on the installer. Some installers get upset at doing what I want, and won’t let me, others have no problem with it. Some installers of the same Distro, but different versions, are also a problem, so it’s best to leave a Linux boot partition on the 1st drive, regardless, because the next upgrade may have an installer that fucks your whole system rather than allow you to install to a slave.

FreeDOS is a special case. It was designed to be able to boot from ANY primary partition on ANY drive that you can set active and get your motherboard to boot from, so obviously it will boot from a slave, with no boot loader needed to fool it about anything.

If you are thinking of trying this, be aware that Winblows (any version) is especially hard to fool into doing what you want, because of Microshit’s arrogance. That’s why they are both on the 1st disk. Although it can be done, getting them to work on the slave may mean you have to reinstall ALL the OSes on the first two disks if you need to reinstall Winblows, because it HAS to be installed first to get it to work.

Reading this over, it seems that I have, in fact, gotten every OS I use on this machine to boot from a slave, at one time or another. I just found it to be less than useful for some. And also, I actually only have 2 booting from the slave, not 3. The 3rd partition (shared FAT16) could be used, but I don’t currently have anything installed to it.

12

Had exactly this issue with the HD from a laptop that spontaneously combusted last year. Plopped the disk into a SATA compatible case with USB, then plugged the disk in like a normal external hard drive - but I had to provide the admin password in order to delete the Windows and Users files. Which would have been OK except for some reason, I couldn’t do this as a batch: I had to do it for every. single. folder. Took hours.