Dual Booting OSes?

[Slyskel]

Can I have one OS running on 4 drives and have a different OS running on a single drive for dual booting? How is data saved in that case? Will it only save data on the single drive when running the secondary OS? 

 

Edit: In hindsight, I should have probably posted this on the "Storage Solutions" section.

[linuxfan66]

Have one/two drive as a data drive and do programs on one. Then split drive one to boot the two oses

[anders_b]

yes you can

[FizzyFantom]

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking here, but I'll try to cover some generic things.

 

When you say one OS running on 4 drives do you mean 4 drives in RAID (1, 5, 10)?

 

I have 4 drives in my PC. One has Windows 7 on it, one has a Linux installation on it, and the other two have my data on. In my case the data drives are completely separate on the OS drives, meaning I can look at the data on the drives from either OS.

 

If you are using some drives for data then you will be able to explore them from another OS without breaking the original OS. Most likely your data drives aren't essential to your current OS and installing another OS on either another drive or on a partition shouldn't cause you an issue.

 

If you could provide some more information and clear up what you meant in your initial question I might be able to help you with your specific issue

[Slyskel]

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking here, but I'll try to cover some generic things.

 

When you say one OS running on 4 drives do you mean 4 drives in RAID (1, 5, 10)?

 

I have 4 drives in my PC. One has Windows 7 on it, one has a Linux installation on it, and the other two have my data on. In my case the data drives are completely separate on the OS drives, meaning I can look at the data on the drives from either OS.

 

If you are using some drives for data then you will be able to explore them from another OS without breaking the original OS. Most likely your data drives aren't essential to your current OS and installing another OS on either another drive or on a partition shouldn't cause you an issue.

 

If you could provide some more information and clear up what you meant in your initial question I might be able to help you with your specific issue

I just wanted to know if I run another OS from a new drive, which drive would it save data onto and which drive could I access data from?

[FizzyFantom]

I just wanted to know if I run another OS from a new drive, which drive would it save data onto and which drive could I access data from?

The new OS would usually be completely installed on the second drive.

 

If both OS are Windows then all boot info will end up on the first drive, but this can be avoided by making sure only the desired drive is connected when installing an OS onto it.

 

If you plan to have two separate Windows OS on one PC then they will both be able to read all the data from all drives. There might be permissions issues here, but I believe different Windows installations can access non-personal folders (such as folders on the root of a second drive) without issue.

 

If you are installing OSX or a Linux distro alongside Windows then you will be able to get to the Windows drives from Linux/OSX but not the other way around. I'm not sure about any other Unix- or non-Unix-based OS, but OSX and Linux 3.X distros handle NTFS well.

 

I hope this helps, feel free to ask if you have any more questions